it by our fires for a time,
full of ill speech and rough ways, drinking evil drinks and gambling
through long nights and days, with a great unrest always in their
hearts, till the call of the white men came to them and they went away
again to the unknown places. And they were without honor and respect,
jeering the old-time customs and laughing in the faces of chief and
shamans.

"As I say, we were become a weak breed, we Whitefish. We sold our warm
skins and furs for tobacco and whiskey and thin cotton things that
left us shivering in the cold. And the coughing sickness came upon us,
and men and women coughed and sweated through the long nights, and
the hunters on trail spat blood upon the snow. And now one, and now
another, bled swiftly from the mouth and died. And the women bore few
children, and those they bore were weak and given to sickness. And
other sicknesses came to us from the white men, the like of which we
had never known and could not understand. Smallpox, likewise measles,
have I heard these sicknesses named, and we died of them as die the
salmon in the still eddies when in the fall their eggs are spawned and
there is no longer need for them to live.

"And yet, and here be the strangeness of it, the white men come as
the breath of death; all their ways lead to death, their nostrils
are filled with it; and yet they do not die. Theirs the whiskey,
and tobacco, and short-haired dogs; theirs the many sicknesses, the
smallpox and measles, the coughing and mouth-bleeding; theirs the
white skin, and softness to the frost and storm; and theirs the
pistols that shoot six times very swift and are worthless. And yet
they grow fat on their many ills, and prosper, and lay a heavy hand
over all the world and tread mightily upon its peoples. And their
women, too, are soft as little babes, most breakable and never broken,
the mothers of men. And out of all this softness, and sickness, and
weakness, come strength, and power, and authority. They be gods, or
devils, as the case may be. I do not know. What do I know, I,
old Imber of the Whitefish? Only do I know that they are past
understanding, these white men, far-wanderers and fighters over the
earth that they be.

"As I say, the meat in the forest became less and less. It be true,
the white man's gun is most excellent and kills a long way off; but of
what worth the gun, when there is no meat to kill? When I was a boy on
the Whitefish there was moose on every hill, and