VI
Ni-na Us-tak-wi (Chief Mountain)
September 7.
WE came up here the other day to the foot of this great landmark of the country, and made camp beside a running spring in the edge of the timber. The mountain is most appropriately named. It is the outer one of an eastward projecting spur of the range, and is higher than any of the peaks behind it. A chief, a leader, should always be taller, more conspicuous in every way than his followers. This mountain gradually slopes up eastward from the one behind it to an altitude of 9056 feet, then drops in a sheer cliff several thousand feet to its steep slope running down to the plain. From several hundred miles to the north, and an equal distance to the south, and from the Bear Paw Mountains to the east, it can be plainly seen, grim, majestic, a veritable Chief of Mountains, and for that reason the Blackfeet so named it in the long ago.
The way to climb the mountain is by the long, narrow, and in places cut-walled ridge running up toward its summit from the west, and then one has but one cliff to surmount, the one almost at its crest. Only men and goats and bighorn can scale that cliff, but on the extreme summit lies an old buffalo skull, taken there by a Blackfoot in the long ago for a pillow rest while getting his medicine dream. There he fasted for days, and at last, in his weakened condition resulting from want of food and water, got his vision, his medicine which was to be his guardian through life. Who was it that came to him in his fasting dreams? Ancient Buffalo, perhaps; or, maybe, Morning Star. Whoever it was, he went staggering down the mountain and to camp, absolutely certain that he had found his guardian spirit, his medium for favor with the greatest god of all, the Sun, supreme ruler of this earth.
EN ROUTE TO ICEBERG LAKE
We are here again upon our own ground, the Blackfeet Reservation, and so once more have meat in camp, fat bighorn and fat mule deer, killed by our hunters. This was once a great wintering place for deer and elk, and, higher up, for bighorn. Some years ago a hunter, Na-mik′-ai-yi by name, trailed a band of elk around to the ridge behind the mountain and up its narrow way until they came to the foot of the cliff near the summit and could go no farther. There they turned back toward him and he fired one shot and dropped the leader. The others, afraid to try to dash past him, chose the one alternative: they rushed to the high cliff there on the north side of the ridge, and sprang from it, and were all killed by the fall, eighty head of them!