“She turned upon him, and her eyes were like fire. She tore his hand from her arm, and cried: ‘Never touch me again, good-for-nothing, proud-and-useless man. I would die before I would mate with you.’
“And to her women she said: ‘Do not, any of you, take him for your man.’ And with that she turned and chose a man. The others then, one by one, took their choice of the men. When all had chosen, there was one woman who had no man; all had been taken except Old Man. She would not have him, and became the second wife of one of the men. The choosing over, all started for the women’s camp. Old Man, now very sad-hearted, was for following them; but the chief woman turned and motioned him off. ‘Go away. There is no food for you, no place for you in our camp,’ she told him; and he went away, crying, by himself.
“And that is what Old Man got for being so proud.”
July 30.
We break camp and move northward to-morrow. For the past two days some of us have been riding about on this “Backbone-of-the-World,” as the Blackfeet call the Rocky Mountains, and we have ridden our horses where, in former times, nothing but a bird could go. The Park Supervisor and his engineers and miners and sappers have blasted out trails over the highest parts of the range, making it easy and safe for tenderfeet tourists to view the wonders of this sub-Arctic, greater than Alpine range of mountains. One of the most impressive views is from the summit of the trail from Upper Two Medicine Lake to Cutbank River. The Dry Fork Trail, it is called. At its extreme height the trail is along a mountain crest about thirty feet in width. Mr. L. W. Hill graphically described the stretch the other day, when, after crossing it, he said: “On its east side one can spit straight down three thousand feet into a lake, and on the other side cast a stone that will go down much farther than that!”
Indeed, the view of the mountains and cliffs and canyons from that height is so grand, so stupendous and impressive, that one cannot find words to describe it all.
On another day we went over Cutbank Pass and down the west side of the range, far enough to get a good view of the Pumpelly Glacier, and see the huge ice blocks break from it and drop from a cliff more than two thousand feet in height. They strike the bottom of the canyon with a reverberating crash that can be heard for miles. Just below this glacier, down Nyack Creek three or four miles, is a fine alkaline spring and clay bed where, in other days, old Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill and I were wont to go for bighorn, goats, deer, and elk. All these animals came to it in great numbers, and drank the waters, and ate great wads of the salty mud. We once killed a large grizzly there, whose late autumn coat was as black as that of a black bear.
STABS-BY-MISTAKE, SUN WOMAN, AND HER SON, LITTLE OTTER IN CUTBANK CAÑON