But Anahem saw the outstretched hand as soon as Chance, and stepping quickly forward took it.
"Mika halo nanitch?" (You don't see?), he asked.
"Halo!" replied Ned, and he pointed to his swollen eyelids.
"Mika comtax—by and by skookum nanitch" (I understand, by and by you'll see all right), replied the chief, and then turning he repeated the owl's call twice, and almost immediately a low answer came to him from the woods above.
Luckily for Steve and Ned, the chief of the Chilcotins had met many white men when in his early days he had hunted on the Stikeen river, and all those whom he had met had been servants of a company which has always kept good faith with its Indian neighbours and employés. The honesty and fair dealing of the Hudson Bay Company saved the two white men's lives from Anahem and his tribesmen, as it has saved many a hundred lives both of redskins and whites since the day when the two races first met. Anahem knew that a fresh class of whites had lately come into his country—whites who cared nothing for skins and trading, but who spent all their time digging and making mud-pies by the river banks. He knew it because he had heard of them, had seen their strange canoes upon the Frazer, bottom upwards sometimes; and once he had found one of their tin cups, with something scratched upon it, hanging to a pine-tree, underneath which lay a little pile of bones which the coyotés had cleaned.
Probably these men, he thought, were gold-diggers, and lost as that other one had been lost, whose bones he had seen; but at any rate they were both very weak, and one was blind, so for the sake of that great Company which was honest, Anahem determined to help these men, who, within half an hour of their first meeting with the chief, lay warm and at rest within the glow of his camp-fire.
Then it seemed to Steve that their troubles fell away from them like the forest shadows before the firelight, and it seemed already years ago since he and Ned had sat down in the bushes to die. Anahem's tribe was out for its fall hunt, and Ned and Steve had luckily wandered within the arms of the great drag-net of men, which was still sweeping the hillsides for game. As they lay by the camp-fire Ned and his companion could hear the hunters calling to each other; but the net was broken now, and the cries were the cries of the owl who has killed, not of the owl who still seeks his quarry.
Here and there high up amongst the woods Steve could see a little column of smoke, marking the spot where some belated hunter had made up his mind to pass the night. The fire would serve to cook his food and keep him warm; and if any friend chose to come and help him home with his game, the smoke would guide him. But most of the hunters brought back their game to camp that night, dragging it along the trails, or packing it on their backs, so that before Steve slept he had seen fifteen carcases brought in as the result of this one hunt.
He had often wondered in old days, how men who neither ploughed nor sowed nor kept cattle could manage to live through the long winter months: now he wondered no longer. The Chilcotins had been in camp for a week, and there were only six men amongst them who had muskets, and yet there were four great stacks of raw hides in their camp already—stacks as high as a man's head, and on every bough within a hundred yards of the fires were hanging strips and chunks of deers' meat.