JOHN COLTER— FREE TRAPPER 237 



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 colors 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 headwaters 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 bee (Testurgeon" — that is, a canoe like the nose of a stur- 

 geon. 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, with 

 such an angular narrow prow that it could take the sheerest dip 

 and mount the steepest wave-crest where a rounder boat would 

 fill and swamp. Dragging this from cover, the two white men 

 pushed out on the Jefferson Fork, dipping now on this side, now 

 on that, using the reversible double-bladed paddles which only 

 an amphibious boatman can manage. The two men shot out in 

 midstream, where the mists would hide them from each shore ; 

 a moment later the white fog had enfolded them, and there was no 



