Part 15 (2/2)
Of course, one fool he was kill' and the other fool, h, by Gar! What Indian would have so little sense?”[40]
Of hunting tales, the Indian store is exhaustless That enors up Montagnais, the Noseless One, who still lives on Peace River and once slew the largest bear ever killed in the Rockies, returning to this very fort with one hand dragging the enor the place which his nose no longer graced
”Montagnais? Ah, bien nais, he brave ins soe of Indian blood in his swarthy skin
”Bigosh!+ He brave o stuh sno 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?” eesture
”Bien, donc! Mais, Montagnais, he stick gun-stock in de snow stop heeo off wan beeg bang!
Sacre! Sheol' bear sleep in snow
Montagnais, he tumble on hees back! Mais, nais wink hees eye de bear junais, 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 hi do! De bear she roll over--over--dead's wan stone--c'est vrai! she no nais, 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 vraiflourish the story-teller takes to hinais's heroisotten; and as soon as the Indians recover froins In one of the warehouses stands a trader An Indian approaches with a pack of peltries weighing fro it down, he spreads out the contents Of otter and mink and pekan there will be plenty, for these fish-eaters are most easily taken before midwinter frost has frozen the streams solid In recent years there have been few beaver-skins, a closed season of several years giving the little rodents a chance to multiply By treaty the Indianas ”the sun rises and the rivers flow”; but the fur-trader can enforce a closed season by refusing to barter for the pelts Of musk-rat-skins, hundreds of thousands are carried to the forts every season The little haycock houses of musk-rats offer the trapper easy prey when frost freezes the sloughs, shutting off retreat below, and heavy snow-fall has not yet hidden the little creatures' winter ho 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 dele in pantomime till compromise is effected
But always beaver-skin is the unit of coin Beaver are the Indian's dollars and cents, his shi+llings and pence, his tokens of currency
South of the Arctics, where native intelligence is of higher grade, the beaver values are represented by goose-quills, small sticks, bits of shell, or, most common of all, disks of lead, tea-chests melted down, stamped on one side with the coures 1, 2, 1/2, 1/4, representing so much value in beaver
First of all, then, furs in the pack must be sorted, silver fox worth five hundred dollars separated from cross fox and blue and white worth fro to quality, and froo it was no unusual thing for the Hudson's Bay Coland yearly 10,000 cross fox-skins, 7,000 blue, 100,000 red, half a dozen silver Feolf-skins are in the trapper's pack unless particularly fine speciht 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 h not highly estee hare Buffalo was once the staple of the hunter What the buffalo was the white rabbit is to-day Fros, food Froray fox and chinchilla and seal in iue spares the land by cutting down their prolific nuh to sustain the Indian
Having received so oes to the store counter where begins internais'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 fro scale of prices for his goods as she has for her furs At the terain, so many coins pass across the counter
Frequently an Indian presents hih to buy necessaries What then? I doubt if in all the years of Hudson's Bay Company rule one needy Indian has ever been turned away
The trader advances what the Indian needs and chalks up so ainst the trapper's next hunt
Long ago, when rival traders strove for the furs, whisky played a disgracefully pro 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 cli Hudson's Bay traders did in 1885, when rebel Indians surrounded the Saskatchewan forts, was to split the casks and spill all alcohol
The second thing was to bury a which influence they considered the erous
Ermine is at its best when the cold isfrom fawn to yellow, fro 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 erht 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 ga suspended above the bait being heavy or light, according to the hunter's expectation of large or sed as finest gauzethe rounds of his traps, the hunter has noted curious tiny tracks like the dots and dashes of a telegraphic code Here are little prints slurring into one another in a dash; there, a dead stop, where the quick-eared stoat has paused with beady eyes alert for sobrd or rabbit Here, again, a clear blank on the snohere the crafty little forager has dived below the light surface and wriggled forward like a snake to dart up with a plunge of fangs into the heart-blood of the unwary snow-bunting Froe of the errown ered by a snare The man suspends the noose of a looped twine across the runway froht of the er back with a jerk that lifts the er it instantly Perhaps on one side of the twine he has left bait--srease, or a bit of ers, 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, frorown ermines will be worth only some few ”beaver” at the fort Perfect fur would bea death for the erh the snoith its spear-teeth clutched in the throat of a poor rabbit Srease, he lays it across the track The little erallops and dives to the knife It srease, 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 so new The knife is frosted like ice Ice the ermine has licked, so he licks the knife But alas for the resemblance between ice and steel! Ice turns to water under the warue; steel turns to fire that blisters and holds the foolish little stoat by his inquisitive tongue a hopeless prisoner till the trapper co wolverine or lynx should coobble up priceless ermine, the trapper comes soon And that is the end for the ermine
Before settlers invaded the valley of the Saskatchewan the furs taken at a leading fort would amount to:
Bear of all varieties 400 Ermine, medium 200 Blue fox 4 Red fox 91 Silver fox 3 Marten 2,000 Musk-rat 200,000 Mink 8,000 Otter 500 Skunk 6 Wolf 100 Beaver 5,000 Pekan (fisher) 50 Cross fox 30 White fox 400 Lynx 400 Wolverine 200
The value of these furs in ”beaver” currency varied with the fashi+ons of the civilized world, with the scarcity or plenty of the furs, with the locality of the fort Before beaver became so scarce, 100 beaver equalled 40 marten or 10 otter or 300 musk-rat; 25 beaver equalled 500 rabbit; 1 beaver equalled 2 white fox; and so on down the scale But no set table of values can be given other than the prices realized at the annual sale of Hudson's Bay furs, held publicly in London