Yesterday Guardipe, or, as I prefer to call him, Aí-is-an-ah-mak-an (Takes-Gun-Ahead), climbed with me to the top of White Calf Mountain. There, on the extreme summit of the rough crested mountain, we came upon five bighorn, all ewes, and not one of them with a lamb beside her. During the lambing season here this year there was a continuous downpour of rain and sleet and snow, in which the newborn young undoubtedly perished.
But how tame those five ewes were! We walked to within fifty yards of them, and they gazed at us curiously, now and then nervously stamping the rock with one or the other of their fore feet. And then they circled around us, twice, and finally walked off toward the eastern point of the mountain, often stopping to look back at us, and finally disappeared behind some rock piles.
At the same time Kut′-ai-ko-pak-i (No-Coward-Woman—as my people have named my wife) was having her own experience with the game in this Park. With Miss L——, a Boston friend, she was sitting near the edge of a high, almost cutbank at the edge of the river, when she heard the slow, heavy, twig-snapping tread of an animal back in the brush. She gave her friend a nudge, and pointed in the direction of the sounds, and the two watched and listened. And presently they saw the brush shaking as the animal forced its way through it, and then, half revealed and half concealed in more open brush, they saw a big grizzly coming straight toward them! Right near where they sat a dwarf juniper grew at the edge of the high bank, several of its limbs overhanging it. Without speaking a word, and trembling as though they had ague, they crept to the tree, grasped one of the limbs, and tenaciously gripping it let themselves down over the edge of the bank. And then—the limb broke with a loud snap and down they went along the gravelly incline, so steep that they could get no foothold, over and over, head first, feet first, and sideways, and landed in the river with a loud splash. But they did not mind that: what were bruises and a wetting compared to being mauled by a grizzly? They forded the waist-deep stream and arrived dripping but safe in camp, and were glad to be there!
Although this Glacier National Park is only five years old, the game animals within it have already become very tame. The bighorn and the Rocky Mountain goats no longer flee from parties traversing the mountain trails, and the deer and elk and moose have become almost as fearless as they are. As for the bears, they are continually trying to break into the meat-houses of the different camps. Undoubtedly these mountains and forests within the next ten years will fairly be alive with game. And as to trout, the supply is increasing instead of decreasing. In this Cutbank stream alone there have been caught this season in the neighborhood of two thousand trout, weighing from a fourth of a pound up to four pounds, but since the 1st of April seventy thousand young trout, from the Anaconda hatchery, have been put into it.
CUTBANK RIVER. A GOOD TROUT RIFFLE
July 27.
Last night, in Black Bull’s lodge, we had more tales of the long ago in this Cutbank Valley. Would that I had the time to collect all the Blackfeet legends of the various places in their once enormous domain. From the Saskatchewan to the Yellowstone, and from the Rockies between these two streams, eastward for about three hundred miles, there are tales of adventure, of camp-life, and wonderful legends, for every mountain, stream, butte, and spring within that great area. Said Black Bull last night:—
“I will tell you a story that my grandfather told me. It happened in the days of his fathers’ boyhood, and it is called