212 THE FUR TRADE OF AMERICA 



rainfall of brilliants. Does the Indian trapper see all this ? The 

 white man with white man arrogance doubts whether his tawny 

 brother of the wilds sees the beauty about him, because the Indian 

 has no white man's terms of expression. But ask the bronzed 

 trapper the time of day ; and he tells you by the length of shadow 

 the sun casts, or the degree of light on the snow. Inquire the 

 season of the year ; and he knows by the slant sunlight coming up 

 through the frost smoke of the southern horizon. And get him 

 talking about his Happy Hunting-Grounds ; and after he has 

 filled it with the implements and creatures and people of the chase, 

 he will describe it in the metaphor of what he has seen at sunrise 

 and sunset and under the Northern Lights. He does not see these 

 things with the gabbling exclamatories of a tourist. He sees them 

 because they sink into his nature and become part of his mental 

 furniture. The most brilliant description that I ever heard of the 

 Hereafter was from an old Cree squaw, toothless, wrinkled like 

 leather, belted at the waist like a sack of wool, with hands of dried 

 parchment, and moccasins some five months too odoriferous. Her 

 version ran that Heaven would be full of the music of running waters 

 and south winds ; that there would always be warm gold sunlight 

 like a midsummer afternoon, with purple shadows, where tired 

 women could rest ; that the trees would be covered with blossoms, 

 and all the pebbles of the shore like dewdrops. 



Pushed from the Atlantic seaboard back over the mountains, 

 from the mountains to the Mississippi, west to the Rockies, north 

 to the Great Lakes, all that was to be seen of nature in America 

 the Indian trapper has seen ; though he has not understood. 



But now he holds only a fringe of hunting-grounds, in the 

 timber lands of the Great Lakes, in the canons of the Rockies, 

 and across that Northern land which converges to Hudson Bay, 

 reaching west to Athabasca, east to Labrador. It is in the basin 

 of Hudson Bay regions that the Indian trapper will find his last 

 hunting-grounds. Here climate excludes the white man, and 

 game is plentiful. Here Indian trappers were snaring before 



