But although Tim did his best, his rock seemed to come sailing back to the sloping bluff.
“Guess you are right,” admitted Tim, a little crestfallen; “the rivet is pretty far away.”
Tatanka stood gazing in silence over the sublime panorama. The river appeared to come like a broad glassy channel out of the blue hazy distance in the north. Just below the point it was half a mile wide and Tatanka could easily distinguish the deep dark channel from the light brown sandbars near shore.
Like a wonderful picture the valley spread out below the hunters. Dark groves of elms stood out clearly from long stretches of cottonwood in light gray. The swelling and bursting buds of the bottom maples showed great dashes of a dark ruddy red, while vast stretches of gray and brown marshes were dotted with brighter patches of orange willow and of bright red killikinnick.
“My people once lived here,” said Tatanka, at last. “They loved this land. It is rich and beautiful, and at that time many red deer and elk and black bear lived in these woods. The big game is gone now. The white settlers have too many guns and too many dogs. They drive the deer away.
“It is good that Manitou gave wings to the ducks and the geese, so the white hunters can not kill them all.
“Our people will never come back to this land. Our trails will grow over with weeds, and the graves of our fathers will be forgotten. Our people must learn to plow the field and raise cattle and horses like white men!”
The old trapper also was carried back to his boyhood as he stood gazing over the river, the bayous, and islands, and to the hills two miles away on the Wisconsin side.
“I used to think,” he said to his friend, “that the Wabash and the Illinois were great rivers, but they are just little crawling creeks compared with the Mississippi, and they can show no great woods and grand hills and cliffs like the Mississippi. If these woods were mine, I would build my house on this point and every morning I would see the sun rise over the hills yonder. In the winter I would watch the snow-storms rush down the valley; and in the sultry summer nights I would watch the lightning play between the hills, over the river and among the tree-tops, and hear the thunder roll and echo from bluff to bluff.”
“Are you not afraid of thunder and lightning?” asked Tatanka. “My people are afraid of it and will not travel in a storm.”