WE HEAR FROM CHEROKEE BILL.
It is commonly in September that the savages "go in for the winter hunt," in the region where our story takes place. These hunts are the more important from the animals' fur being in prime condition, and, of course, fetching a better price at the trading centres. The picked hunters of various Indian nations come into the great northern wilds, and are the more mixed up recently, as the railway pioneers and settlers arrive in too strong force to pay much heed to treaty restrictions. The upshot is, that while a tacit truce is tolerably well maintained, so long as every arrow and bullet is required to make "eatable meat," the view, often the contact of enemies, causes a stray hunter of any race to thread his way as gingerly as a soldier advancing among mines, countermines, and torpedoes. Unless under exceptional circumstances, though, the main bodies do not fall on one another. Personal interest, the only motor, imposes this restraint on their ferocious habits.
In sooth, besides the furs they sell, the red men have to preserve some for garments; moreover, there is the flesh of the prizes to be dried by sun or fire, jerked, or crubbed up with salt, to enable them to pass the rigorous winter so fatal to improvident tribes.
As the game gets crowded away from the farmers' axe and the locomotive engine whistle, it thickens, naturally, in the final retreats. In this quarter, it fairly swarms. The buffaloes run still in countless herds; there is plenty of elk, beaver, deer, bear, musk ox, foxes of several kinds, wolves, red, grey, and white, musquash, ermine, a few opossum; and, for winged game, turkeys, prairie fowl, bustard, eagles, and so on. And, besides, the clearer waters furnish fine fish—salmon, trout, perch, sturgeons, the great white fish, and small fry profusely.
Hence the nomads guard this territory as narrowly as their unsteadiness permits. As it is dishonourable for a warrior to use tillage implements, only one or two people sow a little maize, without much assurance they will themselves harvest in the crop. When there is a failure of game, therefore, misery is acute, and famine soon appears to decimate the decaying bands.
The inextinguishable hatred of the ancient possessors of the soil, springs from the invasion and hacking away of the hunting grounds. The trappers and hunters, who went rarely in large knots, were well armed and too well able to take care of their heads to be molested; and, besides, made, no great gaps in the herds. But of late years, selfish, moneymaking, pitiless slaughterers have come out from the advance posts of civilisation, and not only massacred the beasts wantonly for hide and fancy heads and horns, for mere ornaments in millionnaires' vestibules, but in their rear whisky sellers establish shanties. These grow like Jonah's gourd, and wither as fast, it is true; but on their ruins real settlers flock, and towns are speedily laid out. Deer will not abide sheep, it is well known, and so the Indians hate the farmer and grazier only a point less fiercely than these buffalo butchers.
As for the moral: the Indians say that the land was their fathers', or that of the strong hand. When they uphold the latter doctrine, the pioneers plead for the Government troops to take them at their word, or let them wipe the varmint out.
Closing this necessary digression sharply, we proceed with our tale.
The diverse aborigines assembled for the great winter hunt had never been so annoyed before as by the almost simultaneous intrusion of Sir Archie Maclan's sledging party from Canada, the Half-breeds from Red River of the North, and Captain Kidd's gold grabbers from the South.