Two of the hunters hastened back and succeeded in tracing the mother's course a mile up the river to a thicket; there, covered thinly with leaves and with her rifle in her stiffened hand, they found the hapless wanderer, but alas! cold in death. Her set and calm features, her pinched and wasted face, her scantily robed form, mutely but eloquently told a tale of fearful suffering borne with unflinching fortitude. Weak and weary, the deadly cold had stolen upon her in the darkness and with its icy grip had stilled for ever the beating of her brave true heart. Excavating a grave in the snow they decently straightened her limbs, and piling logs and brush upon her remains to keep them from the beasts of prey, silently and sorrowfully left the scene.
Who were these lonely wanderers in that wild and wintry waste! The presence of the rifle and of the large high boots which she wore, together with other circumstances, were evidences which enabled the shrewd hunters to guess a part of their story. It appeared that the family must have consisted originally of three persons, a man and wife, with the child now the sole survivor of the party. Voyaging down the Red river during the preceding summer and autumn; lured onward by the fatal beauty of the region, and deluded by the ease with which their wants could be supplied, they had evidently neglected to provide against the winter, which at length burst upon them all unprepared to encounter its rigors.
The rest of this heart-rending story was gathered from the lips of their little protege. Her father, mother, and herself had started from Otter Tail lake in September, 1862, after the quelling of the Sioux outbreak, and voyaged down the Red river in a canoe, intending to settle in the wild-rice region a few miles southeast of the spot where they then were. Their canoe with most of their household goods had broken from its moorings in November, one night while they were encamped on the shore. The father had gone to bring it back, and being overtaken by a terrible snow-storm, had never returned. [His body was found the following spring.] The mother had managed to procure barely sufficient game during the winter to keep herself and her child alive. The cave, their only shelter, was strewed with the beaks and feathers of birds, and with the teeth and claws of small animals; all the other portions of the game she had shot had been devoured in the extremity to which hunger had reduced them. Her mother, the little girl said, was very weak the last day, and could hardly walk. "I begged to go with her when she took her gun and went out to shoot something for supper, but she told me I must stay at home and keep warm." Home! could that wretched shelter be a home for the hapless mother and her child? Tears were wrung from those rugged sons of the wilderness, and coursed down their iron cheeks when they visited the spot where parental tenderness had striven to shield the object of its affection from the bitter blast. The snow banked about the roots of the tree and showing the marks of her numbed fingers, the crevices stuffed with moss, the bed of dried leaves and the bedding which she had stripped from her own person to cover her child, were proofs and tokens of the love which would have created comfort in the midst of desolation and given even that miserable nook in winter's dreary domain the semblance of a home. In the heart of that frozen waste, far from human fellowship, with hunger gnawing at her vitals and the frost curdling the genial current in her veins, still burned brightly in that poor lonely heart the pure and deathless flame of maternal love.
CHAPTER XIV.
ENCOUNTERS WITH WILD BEASTS—COURAGE AND DARING
The inhabitants of the frontier from the earliest times have had to face the fiercest and most ravenous wild beasts which prowl in the forests of this continent; and the local histories of the various sections and single settlements on our border-land abound in thrilling accounts of combats between those pests of the forest and individual men and women.
Wolves, like the poor, were always with the frontiersmen. Bears, both black and brown, were familiar visitors. The cougar, American lion, catamount, or "painter" (panther), as it is variously styled, was a denizen of every forest from Maine to Georgia, and from the St. Croix River to the Columbia. Wild cats, and even deer, when brought to bay, proved themselves dangerous combatants. Last, but not the least terrible in the catalogue, comes the grizzly bear, the monarch of the rocky waste that lies between the headwaters of the Platte and the Missouri rivers, and the sierras of the Pacific slope.
The stories of rencontres and combats between pioneer women and these savage rangers of the woods, are numerous and thrilling. Sometimes they seem almost improbable, especially to such as have only known Woman as she appears to the dwellers of our eastern cities, and in homes where luxury and ease have softened the sex.
A story like the following, for example, as told by one of our most veracious travelers, may be listened to with at least some degree of incredulity by gentlemen and ladies of the lounge and easy chair. A woman living on the Saskatchewan accompanied her husband on a hunting expedition into the forest. He had been very successful, and having killed one more deer than they could well carry home, he went to the house of a neighboring settler to dispose of it, leaving his wife to take care of the rest until his return. She sat carelessly upon the log with his hunting knife in her hand, when she heard the breaking of branches near her, and turning round, beheld a great bear only a few paces from her.
It was too late to retreat, and, seeing that the animal was very hungry and determined to come to close quarters, she rose, and placed her back against a small tree, holding her knife close to her breast, and in a straight line with the bear.