was a real one with an
epicurean relish for that part of Indian anatomy which the Indian
considers to be the most choice bit of a moose.[36] And the Kootenay
hunter who was sent through the forests of Idaho to follow up the track
of a lost brave brought back proof of an actual bear; for he found a
dead man lying across a pile of logs with his skull crushed in like an
eggshell by something that had risen swift and silent from a lair on the
other side of the logs and dealt the climbing brave one quick terrible
blow. And little blind Ba'tiste, wizened and old, who spent the last
twenty years of his life weaving grass mats and carving curious little
wooden animals for the children of the chief factor, could convince you
that the bears he slew in his young days were very real bears,
altogether different from the clumsy bruins that gambol with boys and
girls through fairy books.

That is, he could convince you if he would; for he usually sat weaving
and weaving at the grasses--weaving bitter thoughts into the woof of his
mat--without a word. Round his white helmet, such as British soldiers
wear in hot lands, he always hung a heavy thick linen thing like the
frill of a sun-bonnet, coming over the face as well as the neck--"to
keep de sun off," he would mumble out if you asked him why. More than
that of the mysterious frill worn on dark days as well as sunny, he
would never vouch unless some town-bred man patronizingly pooh-poohed
the dangers of bear-hunting. Then the grass strands would tremble with
excitement and the little French hunter's body would quiver and he would
begin pouring forth a jumble, half habitant half Indian with a mixture
of all the oaths from both languages, pointing and pointing at his
hidden face and bidding you look what the bear had done to him, but
never lifting the thick frill.

* * * * *

It was somewhere between the tributary waters that flow north to the
Saskatchewan and the rivers that start near the Saskatchewan to flow
south to the Missouri. Ba'tiste and the three trappers who were with him
did not know which side of the boundary they were on. By slow travel,
stopping one day to trap beaver, pausing on the way to forage for meat,
building their canoes where they needed them and abandoning the boats
when they made a long overland _portage_, they were three weeks north of
the American fur post on the banks of the Missouri. The hunters were
travelling light-handed