hrough the blackness of some far canon, the
crashing of rocks thrown down by unknown forces, the shivering echo that
multiplied itself a thousandfold and ran "rocketing" from peak to peak
startling the silences--these things filled the Indian with
superstitious fears.

The gnomes, called in trapper's vernacular "hoodoos"--great pillars of
sandstone higher than a house, left standing in valleys by prehistoric
floods--were to the Crows and Blackfeet petrified giants that only
awakened at night to hurl down rocks on intruding mortals. And often the
quiver of a shadow in the night wind gave reality to the Indian's fears.
The purr of streams over rocky bed was whispering, the queer quaking
echoes of falling rocks were giants at war, and the mists rising from
swaying waterfalls, spirit-forms portending death.

Morning came more ghostly among the peaks.

Thick white clouds banked the mountains from peak to base, blotting out
every scar and tor as a sponge might wash a slate. Valleys lay blanketed
in smoking mist. As the sun came gradually up to the horizon far away
east behind the mountains, scarp and pinnacle butted through the fog,
stood out bodily from the mist, seemed to move like living giants from
the cloud banks. "How could they do that if they were not alive?" asked
the Indian. Elsewhere, shadows came from sun, moon, starlight, or
camp-fire. But in these valleys were pencilled shadows of peaks upside
down, shadows all the colours of the rainbow pointing to the bottom of
the green Alpine lakes, hours and hours before any sun had risen to
cause the shadows. All this meant "bad medicine" to the Indian, or, in
white man's language, mystery.

Unless they were foraging in large bands, Crows and Blackfeet shunned
the mountains after nightfall. That gave the white man a chance to trap
in safety.

Early one morning two white men slipped out of their sequestered cabin
built in hiding of the hills at the head waters of the Missouri. Under
covert of brushwood lay a long odd-shaped canoe, sharp enough at the
prow to cleave the narrowest waters between rocks, so sharp that French
_voyageurs_ gave this queer craft the name "_canot a bec
d'esturgeon_"--that is, a canoe like the nose of a sturgeon. This
American adaptation of the Frenchman's craft was not of birch-bark. That
would be too frail to essay the rock-ribbed canons of the mountain
streams. It was usually a common dugout, hollowed from a cottonwood or
other light timber,