elt at the Fort of the Prairies
for many years, but when the first missionaries reached Red River in
1818, he persuaded his friends to send him to St. Boniface to meet the
priests and ended his days in M. Provencher's house. He employed his
time during the last years of his life in making crosses and crucifixes
blind as he was, but he never made any _chefs d'oeuvre_."

Such is bear-hunting and such is the nature of the bear. And these
things are not of the past. Wherever long-range repeaters have not put
the fear of man in the animal heart, the bear is the aggressor. Even as
I write comes word from a little frontier fur post which I visited in
1901, of a seven-year-old boy being waylaid and devoured by a grisly
only four miles back from a transcontinental railway. This is the second
death from the unprovoked attacks of bears within a month in that
country--and that month, the month of August, 1902, when sentimental
ladies and gentlemen many miles away from danger are sagely discussing
whether the bear is naturally ferocious or not--whether, in a word, it
is altogether _humane to hunt bears_.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 36: In further confirmation of Montagnais's bear, the chief
factor's daughter, who told me the story, was standing in the fort gate
when the Indian came running back with a grisly pelt over his shoulder.
When he saw her his hands went up to conceal the price he had paid for
the pelt.]

[Footnote 37: This phase of prairie life must not be set down to
writer's license. It is something that every rider of the plains can see
any time he has patience to rein up and sit like a statue within
field-glass distance of the gopher burrows about nightfall when the
badgers are running.]

CHAPTER XIII

JOHN COLTER--FREE TRAPPER

Long before sunrise hunters were astir in the mountains.

The Crows were robbers, the Blackfeet murderers; and scouts of both
tribes haunted every mountain defile where a white hunter might pass
with provisions and peltries which these rascals could plunder.

The trappers circumvented their foes by setting the traps after
nightfall and lifting the game before daybreak.

Night in the mountains was full of a mystery that the imagination of the
Indians peopled with terrors enough to frighten them away. The sudden
stilling of mountain torrent and noisy leaping cataract at sundown when
the thaw of the upper snows ceased, the smothered roar of rivers under
ice, the rush of whirlpools t