Nearly all these Indians use just such old muskets, bought from the Hudson Bay Company, and yet they keep them in covers made of the skin of the seal, which they kill in the rivers hereabout, or of deer or other animals. They take excellent care of their guns in this respect, but I have never seen one of them clean or oil his weapon, and several of them told me they seldom do so.
My Winchester express, with fancy stock, Lyman sight, etc., was a curiosity to them. None of them had ever seen anything like it, and one of them asked me what kind of a rifle it was. When told it was a Winchester, he said:
"I didn't know Winchester so big like dat. Didn't know he had stock like dat." He had only seen the little .44 Winchester, with a plain stock, and innocently supposed it was the only kind made.
Pean and I had a hard day's work toiling up the mountain through fallen timber, over and around great ledges of jutting rock, across deep, rugged cañons and gulches, and through dense jungles of underbrush. About two o'clock in the afternoon we halted, lay down for a rest, and had been there but a few minutes when I heard the sharp, familiar chatter of the little pine squirrel. I looked around quickly, expecting to see one within a few feet of me, but instead saw Pean lying close to the ground, beckoning to me and pointing excitedly up the game trail in which we had been walking. Looking through the thick, intervening brush, I saw two deer, a buck and a doe, looking toward us. They had not seen nor scented us, but had merely heard the chatter of the little squirrel, as they supposed, and, though apparently as completely deceived by it as I had been, they had stopped to listen, as they do at almost every sound they hear in the woods. But there was no squirrel there. Pean had taken this method of calling my attention, and had imitated the cry of the familiar little cone-eater so perfectly that even the deer had been deceived by it.
I cautiously and slowly drew my rifle to my shoulder, and taking aim at the breast of the buck, fired. Both deer bounded away into thicker brush, and were out of sight in an instant. Pean sprang after them, and in a few minutes I heard the dull, muffled report of his musket. He shouted to me, and going to him I found the buck dead and the Indian engaged in butchering it. My bullet had gone a little farther to the left than I intended, breaking its shoulder, and had passed out through the ribs on the same side. The deer had fallen after going but a few yards, but was not quite dead when Pean came up and shot it through the head. We took out the entrails, cut a choice roast of the meat for our supper and breakfast, and hurried on our way.
We camped at four o'clock on a small bench of the mountain, and you may rest assured, gentle reader, that our conversation in front of the camp fire that night was novel. Pean, you will remember, could not speak half a dozen words of English. He spoke entirely in Chinook, and I knew but a few words of that jargon. I had a Chinook dictionary with me, however, and by its aid was able to pick out the few words necessary in what little talking I had to do, and to translate enough of Pean's answers to my questions to get along fairly well. The great trouble with him seemed to be that he was wound up to talk, and whenever I made a remark or asked a question in his adopted language he turned loose, and talked until I shut him off with "Halo kumtucks" (I don't understand). No matter how often I repeated this he seemed soon to forget it, and would open on me again whenever he got a cue. He was a fluent talker, and if I had only been well up in the jargon, I could have got lots of pointers from him.
The deer of this region is the true black-tail (Cervus columbianus), not the mule-deer (Cervus macrotis), that is so often miscalled the black-tail. The black-tail is smaller than the mule-deer, and its ears, though not so large as those of the latter, are larger than those of the Virginia deer (Cervus virginianus). Its tail is white underneath, dark outside, shading to black at the lower end, and while longer than that of the mule-deer, is not so long as that of the Virginia deer.
