Ba'tiste raised his hands to his face.
"Mon dieu!" he asked thickly, fumbling with both hands, "what is done to my eyes? Is the fire out? I cannot see!"
Then the man who had fought like a demon armed with only a hunting-knife fainted because of what his hands felt.
Traitors there are among trappers as among all other classes, men like those who deserted Glass on the Missouri, and Scott on the Platte, and how many others whose treachery will never be known.
But Ba'tiste's comrades stayed with him on the banks of the river that flows into the Missouri. One cared for the blind man. The other two foraged for game. When the wounded hunter could be moved, they put him in a canoe and hurried down-stream to the fur post before the freezing of the rivers. At the fur post, the doctor did what he could; but a doctor cannot restore what has been torn away. The next spring, Ba'tiste was put on a pack horse and sent to his relatives at the Canadian fur post. Here his sisters made him the curtain to hang round his helmet and set him to weaving grass mats that the days might not drag so wearily.
Ask Ba'tiste whether he agrees with the amateur hunter that bears never attack unless they are attacked, that they would never become ravening creatures of prey unless the assaults of other creatures taught them ferocity, ask Ba'tiste this and something resembling the snarl of a baited beast breaks from the lipless face under the veil:
"S—s—sz!—" with a quiver of inexpressible rage. "The bear—it is an animal!—the bear!—it is a beast!—toujours!—the bear!—it is a beast!—always—always!" And his hands clinch.
Then he falls to carving of the little wooden animals and weaving of sad, sad, bitter thoughts into the warp of the Indian mat.
Are such onslaughts common among bears, or are they the mad freaks of the bear's nature? President Roosevelt tells of two soldiers bitten to death in the South-West; and M. L'Abbé Dugast, of St. Boniface, Manitoba, incidentally relates an experience almost similar to that of Ba'tiste which occurred in the North-West. Lest Ba'tiste's case seem overdrawn, I quote the Abbé's words: