d-to-hand duels between white
traders were incomprehensible pieces of folly.]

[Footnote 41: It need hardly be explained that it is the prairie Indian
and not the forest Ojibway who places the body on high scaffolding above
the ground; hence the woman's dilemma.]

[Footnote 42: The flag was hoisted on Sundays to notify the Indians
there would be no trade.]

[Footnote 43: Governor Norton will, of course, be recalled as the most
conspicuous for his brutality.]

CHAPTER XV

KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT

Old whaling ships, that tumble round the world and back again from coast
to coast over strange seas, hardly ever suffer any of the terrible
disasters that are always overtaking the proud men-of-war and swift
liners equipped with all that science can do for them against
misfortune. Ask an old salt why this is, and he will probably tell you
that he _feels_ his way forward or else that he steers by the same chart
as _that_--jerking his thumb sideways from the wheel towards some sea
gull careening over the billows. A something, that is akin to the
instinct of wild creatures warning them when to go north for the summer,
when to go south for the winter, when to scud for shelter from coming
storm, guides the old whaler across chartless seas.

So it is with the trapper. He may be caught in one of his great
steel-traps and perish on the prairie. He may run short of water and die
of thirst on the desert. He may get his pack horses tangled up in a
valley where there is no game and be reduced to the alternative of
destroying what will carry him back to safety or starving with a horse
still under him, before he can get over the mountains into another
valley--but the true trapper will literally never lose himself. Lewis
and Clark rightly merit the fame of having first _explored_ the
Missouri-Columbia route; but years before the Louisiana purchase, free
trappers were already on the Columbia. David Thompson of the North-West
Company was the first Canadian to _explore_ the lower Columbia; but
before Thompson had crossed the Rockies, French hunters were already
ranging the forests of the Pacific slope. How did these coasters of the
wilds guide themselves over prairies that were a chartless sea and
mountains that were a wilderness? How does the wavey know where to find
the rush-grown inland pools? Who tells the caribou mother to seek refuge
on islands where the water will cut off the wolves that would prey on
her young?

Something,