She would not let me mention any bear except in terms of compliment, as "The gentleman with the fur coat," or "The Inspector General of Berries." Once, when I used the words, "Damned Greedy Brute," a grizzly overheard me, and ate our camp that night. "I told you so," said Rain.
As to shooting a grizzly: "He is always annoyed," quoth Rain. "And sometimes more so." I shot that robber, all the same, and my wife needs hang up her best frock as a sacrifice to the sun before she dared touch the skin. She moistened its brain with her tears while she dressed the pelt, and when the work was finished refused to sleep in the lodge with it for company. Indeed, she made such a fuss that I gave up hunting bears and they could cock snooks at me whenever we happened to meet. The fact is, Rain tamed me until I had not so much as a vice to call my own.
They do say that when the lion is dead, even the very hares will pull its mane.
We had our little troubles. There was, for example, a good deal of starving to do. But God is omnipotent: and money is His lieutenant. My pay for being a marquis, five hundred dollars a year, went a long way toward putting off inevitable famines. Each year, too, we brought our pelts to the traders, who were surprised at the prices they had to pay in guns and ammunition, traps, tobacco and comforts. They said I was aptly named as Charging Buffalo.
Under our chief's direction, we turned weavers, making our scratchy blankets of mountain goat hair. They fetched a deal of money; but with the pottery we were not successful. My Indian brother, Many Horses, had only to give one squint, and our best pots fell all to pieces.
Sometimes in spring we would plant corn, pumpkins and tobacco, and if we happened to pass that way in the fall, would gather such a crop as the wild things had spared to us. Great were our harvests, too, of camass and wild fruit dried and stored up for winter. If ever we happened to kill a maverick cow, we tanned the skin, dried the meat and buried the bones, leaving no trace of our crime against the white men's buffalo. Very particular, too, was Rain with our young men, forbidding them to steal chickens or even to scalp settlers.
That was not, she said, the way to ignore the white men. So, barring the needs of trade, we left them severely alone, and played at ghosts on our moonlight flittings through any outlying settlements.
Sometimes we rescued lost and starving travelers, who would spread the news of an unknown Indian tribe at large in the wilderness. Once, an official came to herd us back to our reservation, but unfortunately his interpreter could not speak our language and, as none of us understood a single word of English, we could not make out what was the matter with him. We fed this person and his interpreter, we gave them tobacco, we tucked them up in bed and sang a lullaby; but when they fell asleep, we broke our camp and vanished, leaving no tracks on land because we went by water, a long night's march along a river bed. The white men reported us drowned, but Rain explained to me that this was not so.
We wandered along the ranges wherever we found food, southward to Mexico and northward into the Alps of St. Elias, wintering in alpine pastures, traveling in summer through the upper forests and the nether deserts. But where we went during those happy years, I have not the slightest notion, for, after all, heart's ease and life's delight are poor geographers. We were not careful of maps, considerate of the way, or very much concerned as to our destination.
Once we were in a valley of the Canadian Rockies, a gorge so fouled with deadfall, with beaver swamps and snow-slides, that, high as the water ran, we were forced to seek our passage along the river bed. Then came a cut bank strewn with fallen trees, which reached out into the middle of the current. At that, the rock floor on which our horses waded came to an end, and down we went into deep water, compelled to swim across to the farther bank. The ponies rolled in the swell of that white-manned rapid like boats in a storm at sea. I turned and saw Rain laughing. Then my horse went under altogether, rolling over three times without touching bottom, and both of us were very nearly drowned.