When the sun wears the snow thin, the butter-cups underneath feel the light and the warmth, so they have faith, melting their way up through the edges of the drifts until they reach the glory of the day. Then the ice breaks, roaring down the river, shatters and founders on the lake, while the birds proclaim the summer to the valleys, avalanches thunder in the hills, because it is Easter, the time of the Resurrection.
The American trapper was much surprised at having behaved himself so nicely as to win Storm's friendship and the hearty good will of the tribe. He was quite touched by the treatment he met with. The trapping outfit, lost when they burned him out of winter quarters, had been most lavishly replaced in payment for his gunpowder. He said he felt good. He helped to ballast the canoes with bullets, even to stow the cargo of powder and furs for Fort Colville. And yet he had misgivings.
The Kutenais bark canoe is curiously fashioned with a long horn or ram at either end below the water line. Because its natural position is bottom upwards, it is not popular. Nobody really enjoys it except the Flatbow Indians of Flatbow Lake. And yet it has one merit: one can spell Kutenai in seventy-six recognized orthodox ways and always pronounce the word Flatbow. Still Hunt-the-girls saw the loaded canoes and heard of the cataracts, and to him the spelling and pronunciation were mere details. He was quite frank about it. He flatly refused the journey. He would be doggoned and several other disagreeable things would happen to him before he would go trading to a British Fort. He had no sort of use for Britishers anyways, having whipped 'em at Bunker Hill—wherever that was—and kep' 'em on the dead run ever since. He didn't give a continental—whatever that might be—about Injuns, which wasn't good unless they was dead, and hadn't ought to be allowed out with guns for shooting the whites. Moreover, he'd heard tell of a crick up North a-ways, which was plumb spoiled with beaver dams, as needed clearing out with his little set of traps. Two Bits would loan him her dugout. There was no two ways about it. "And I'm due," he told Storm, "to roll my tail in the mawning."
Now the four widows, resolved that the trader who represented the tribe at Fort Colville should be dressed to do them credit, had made a deerskin hunting shirt, leggings and moccasins soft as silk, golden-tawny, perfumed with wood smoke. The deep fringes about the shoulders and along the seams, whose pattering throws off snow to keep the leather dry, the decoration of porcupine quills, dyed lemon, plum bloom, indigo, and vermilion, in sacred patterns which charm away disease, wounds, or death, made this gift beautiful, the most precious that love could offer. When Hunt-the-girls refused to trade for the tribe the widows brought their offering to Storm, and, cut to the quick, the trapper declared it was rotten anyway.
Storm sat in Fatbald's chair before the fire and let the women lay the hunting dress upon his knees. "Get out!" he said to Hunt-the-girls. "Get out of my camp—you!"
And Hunt-the-girls left in a rage. Storm heard him swearing at the men while he got his dugout canoe afloat and loaded for the North. Then the women saw that their friend wanted to be alone, so they left him.
"Rain!" he whispered. "My Dream! Rain!"
"Storm," she answered out of the air, "I heard, dear."
"How long?" he asked—"how long?" And tears were running down his face.
"We have waited," she answered, "all our lives. Dearest, you are not obliged to go to the Fort of the Stone-hearts."