Old Beaver-tail had mapped the country for him, and like an Indian, Storm squatted on his heels making lines on the dust of the trail with a dry twig. "The river of the Kutenais," he said, "starts here."
In the heart of the Rockies, within a mile or so of the Canadian Pacific Railway, snows on ten-thousand-foot Alps drain to the southward, down tangled steeps of forest, calling from stream to stream along the hillsides, a shrill assembly of many waters, source of a white-maned torrent roaring through deep gorges. Purling over gravels, hurling round short curves, and undercutting cliffs, the river widens out among pine-crested isles, and spreads in beaver-flooded jungle. Then it snakes through meads of wild flowers, and coils like a serpent by miles of widening prairie, glittering in the sunshine.
"'Ere," said Storm, "across these pastures it swings, being here ten bowshots distant from the head source of the Columbia. The Kootenay River wagers ponies to little dogs on the path towards the sun, but the Columbia says its prayers and hits the trail nor'west. Both is beaten, for here's my range of mountains walling off the west, miles high snows, hundreds of miles in length."
Look at the maps and see how very few large rivers manage to flow to the westward against the terrific eastward trend of the earth's surface.
"At last," said Storm, "the Columbia finds a way round the norrard end of my Alps, and the Kootenay sneaks around the southern foothills. Each makes a hairpin bend. They've both got lost in the woods, so the Columbia flows due south, and the Kootenay due north. Here on the Kootenay is our herd camp, that's the bulrush swamps, and there's my trading post on the only bit of gravel which doesn't flood in summer. And here's our hundred-mile lake.
"By this time the Kootenay cools off and gets lonesome, so it finds a hollowed lip 'ere at the West Arm, and goes ramping down big falls to the Columbia. This way!' says he, 'due west!' but the old Columbia knows what's best, and keeps straight on down through them lava deserts, and the big volcanoes."
"Your mountains form the island, then?" said the factor.
Storm looked up at Douglas, and his face had a yearning, hungry ferocity reminding the factor of a mother wolf guarding her cubs.
"When I gets my guns," he said, "I can 'old that range of Alps agin the world. But you wants trade. Well, here's the World Spine, and them Blackfoot prairies. Here's the Flatheads down south past Tobacco Plains. Here's the Shushwap tribes nor'west of us. There's trade enough."
He stood up facing Douglas. "Who gets the trade?" he asked—"you or them Americans?"