the savage "big Indian me"; if only an ordinary vagrant of woods
and streams, the white man was "big knife you," in distinction to the
red man carrying only primitive weapons. Very often the free trapper
slipped away from the fur post secretly, or at night; for there were
questions of licenses which he disregarded, knowing well that the buyer
of his furs would not inform for fear of losing the pelts. Also and more
important in counseling caution, the powerful fur companies had spies on
the watch to dog the free trapper to his hunting-grounds; and rival
hunters would not hesitate to bribe the natives with a keg of rum for
all the peltries which the free trapper had already bought by advancing
provisions to Indian hunters. Indeed, rival hunters have not hesitated
to bribe the savages to pillage and murder the free trapper; for there
was no law in the fur trading country, and no one to ask what became of
the free hunter who went alone into the wilderness and never returned.

Going out alone, or with only one partner, the free hunter encumbered
himself with few provisions. Two dollars worth of tobacco would buy a
thousand pounds of "jerked" buffalo meat, and a few gaudy trinkets for a
squaw all the pemmican white men could use.

Going by the river routes, four days out from St. Louis brought the
trapper into regions of danger. Indian scouts hung on the watch among
the sedge of the river bank. One thin line of upcurling smoke, or a
piece of string--_babiche_ (leather cord, called by the Indians
_assapapish_)--fluttering from a shrub, or little sticks casually
dropped on the river bank pointing one way, all were signs that told of
marauding bands. Some birch tree was notched with an Indian cipher--a
hunter had passed that way and claimed the bark for his next year's
canoe. Or the mark might be on a cottonwood--some man wanted this tree
for a dugout. Perhaps a stake stood with a mark at the entrance to a
beaver-marsh--some hunter had found this ground first and warned all
other trappers off by the code of wilderness honour. Notched tree-trunks
told of some runner gone across country, blazing a trail by which he
could return. Had a piece of fungus been torn from a hemlock log? There
were Indians near, and the squaw had taken the thing to whiten leather.
If a sudden puff of black smoke spread out in a cone above some distant
tree, it was an ominous sign to the trapper. The Indians had set fire to
the inside of a punky trunk and