THE HEADLESS INDIAN. 297 



existence as far as possible by sucking every particle 

 of nutriment out of the broken fragments. He was 

 probably a Rocky Mountain Sbusliwap, wbo had been, 

 like ourselves, endeavouring to reach Kamloops, per- 

 haps in quest of a wife. He had evidently intended 

 to subsist by fishing, but before his tackle was com- 

 pleted, weakness — perchance illness — overtook him, he 

 made a small fire, squatted down before it, and died 

 there. But where was his head ? We searched 

 diligently everywhere, but could find no traces of it. 

 If it had fallen off we should have found it lying near, 

 for an animal which had dared to abstract that would 

 have returned to attack the body. It could not have 

 been removed by violence, as the undisturbed position 

 of the trunk bore witness. We could not solve the 

 problem, and left him as we found him, taking only 

 his little axe for our necessities, and the steel, fishing- 

 line, and hooks as mementoes of the strange event. We 

 walked back to the camp silent and full of thought. 

 Our spirits,^ already sufficiently low from physical 

 w(5akness and the uncertainty of our position, were 

 gieatly depressed by this somewhat ominous dis- 

 covery. The similarity between the attempt of the 

 Indian to penetrate through the pathless forest — his 

 starvation, his killing of his hoi^se for food — and our 

 own condition was striking. His story had been 

 exhibited before our eyes with unmistakable clearness 

 by the spectacle we had just left : increasing weak- 

 ness ; hopeless starvation ; the effort to sustain the 

 waning life by sucking the fragments of bones ; 

 the death from want at last. We also had arrived 

 at such extremity that we should be compelled to 



