“It seems that our principal claim to fame up here is whisky,” said Stonor.
He gave the old man a pill. Lookoovar swallowed it eagerly, but looked disappointed at the absence of immediate results.
All these men were hunting their dinners. Close to the shore they paddled softly against the current, or drifted silently down, searching the bushes with their keen flat eyes for the least stir. Since everything had to come down to the river sooner or later to drink, they could have had no better point of vantage. Every man had a gun in his canoe, but ammunition is expensive on the Swan River, and for small fry, musk-rat, duck, fool-hen, or rabbit, they still used the prehistoric bow and arrow.
“The Swan River is like the Kakisas’ Main Street,” said Stonor. “All day they mosey up and down looking in the shop-windows for bargains in feathers and furs.”
They camped for the night on a cleared point occupied by the bare poles of several tepees. The Indians left these poles standing at all the best sites along the river, ready to use the next time they should spell that way. They frequently left their caches too, that is to say, spare gear, food and what-not, trustfully hanging from near-by branches in birch-bark containers. The Kakisas even tote water in bark pails.
Next day the character of the river changed. It now eddied around innumerable short bends right and left with an invariable regularity, each bend so like the last they lost all track of the distance they had come. Its course was as regularly crooked as a crimping-iron. On each bend it ate under the bank on the outside, and deposited a bar on the inside. On one side the pines toppled into the water as their footing was undermined, while poplars sprang up on the other side in the newly-made ground.
On the afternoon of this day they suddenly came upon the village of which they had been told. It fronted on a little lagoon behind one of the sand-bars. This was the village where Imbrie was said to have cured the Kakisas of measles. At present most of the inhabitants were pitching off up and down the river, and there were only half a dozen covered tepees in sight, but the bare poles of many others showed the normal extent of the village.
The usual furore of excitement was caused by their unheralded appearance around the bend. For a moment the Indians completely lost their heads, and there was a mad scurry for the tepees. Some mothers dragged their screaming offspring into the bush for better shelter. Only one or two of the bravest among the men dared show themselves. But with true savage volatility they recovered from their panic as suddenly as they had been seized. One by one they stole to the edge of the bank, where they stood staring down at the travellers, with their shoe-button eyes empty of all human expression.
Stonor had no intention of landing here. He waited with the nose of the Serpent resting in the mud until the excitement died down. Then, through Mary, he requested speech with the head man.
A bent old man tottered down the bank with the aid of a staff. He wore a dirty blanket capote—and a bicycle cap! He faced them, his head wagging with incipient palsy, and his dim eyes looking out bleared, indifferent, and jaded. Sparse grey hairs decorated his chin. It was a picture of age without reverence.