Part 8 (2/2)

So ended the merry game of spying on the mountaineers.

As for the mountaineers, they fell into the meshes of their own snares; for on the way to Snake River, when parleying with friendly Blackfeet, the accidental discharge of Bridger's gun brought a volley of arrows from the Indians, one hooked barb lodging in Bridger's shoulder-blade, which he carried around for three years as a memento of his own trickery.

Fitzpatrick fared as badly. Instigated by the American Fur Company, the Crows attacked him within a year, stealing everything that he possessed.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 32: This is no exaggeration. Smith's trappers, who were scattered from Fort Vancouver to Monterey, the Astorians, Major Andrew Henry's party--had all been such wide-ranging foresters.]

[Footnote 33: Fitzpatrick was late in reaching the hunting-ground this year, owing to a disaster with Smith on the way back from Santa Fe.]

[Footnote 34: By law the Hudson's Bay had no right in this region from the pa.s.sing of the act forbidding British traders in the United States.

But, then, no man had a right to steal half a million of another's furs, which was the record of the Rocky Mountain men.]

PART II

CHAPTER IX

THE TAKING OF THE BEAVER

All summer long he had hung about the fur company trading-posts waiting for the signs.

And now the signs had come.

Foliage crimson to the touch of night-frosts. Crisp autumn days, spicy with the smell of nuts and dead leaves. Birds flying away southward, leaving the woods silent as the snow-padded surface of a frozen pond.

h.o.a.r-frost heavier every morning; and thin ice edged round stagnant pools like layers of mica.

Then he knew it was time to go. And through the Northern forests moved a new presence--the trapper.

Of the tawdry, flash clothing in which popular fancy is wont to dress him he has none. Bright colours would be a danger-signal to game. If his costume has any colour, it is a waist-belt or neck-scarf, a toque or bright handkerchief round his head to keep distant hunters from mistaking him for a moose. For the rest, his clothes are as ragged as any old, weather-worn garments. Sleeping on balsam boughs or cooking over a smoky fire will reduce the newness of blanket coat and buckskin jacket to the dun shades of the grizzled forest. A few days in the open and the trapper has the complexion of a bronzed tree-trunk.

Like other wild creatures, this foster-child of the forest gradually takes on the appearance and habits of woodland life. Nature protects the ermine by turning his russet coat of the gra.s.s season to spotless white for midwinter--except the jet tail-tip left to lure hungry enemies and thus, perhaps, to prevent the little stoat degenerating into a sloth.

And the forest looks after her foster-child by transforming the smartest suit that ever stepped out of the clothier's bandbox to the dull tints of winter woods.

This is the seasoning of the man for the work. But the trapper's training does not stop here.

When the birds have gone south the silence of a winter forest on a windless day becomes tense enough to be snapped by either a man's breathing or the breaking of a small twig; and the trapper acquires a habit of moving through the brush with noiseless stealth. He must learn to see better than the caribou can hear or the wolf smell--which means that in keenness and accuracy his sight outdistances the average field-gla.s.s. Besides, the trapper has learned how to look, how to see, and seeing--discern; which the average man cannot do even through a field-gla.s.s. Then animals have a trick of deceiving the enemy into mistaking them for inanimate things by suddenly standing stock-still in closest peril, unflinching as stone; and to match himself against them the trapper must also get the knack of instantaneously becoming a statue, though he feel the clutch of bruin's five-inch claws.

And these things are only the _a b c_ of the trapper's woodcraft.

One of the best hunters in America confessed that the longer he trapped the more he thought every animal different enough from the fellows of its kind to be a species by itself. Each day was a fresh page in the book of forest-lore.

It is in the month of May-goosey-geezee, the Ojibways' trout month, corresponding to the late October and early November of the white man, that the trapper sets out through the illimitable stretches of the forest land and waste prairie south of Hudson Bay, between Labrador and the Upper Missouri.

<script>