276 THE FUR TRADE OF AMERICA 



the Catholic mission. On the hunting-field, when suddenly menaced 

 by some great danger, he would cry out in the Indian tongue 

 words that meant "O Great Spirit I" And it is altogether probable 

 that at the mission and on the hunting-field, Koot was worship- 

 ping the same Being. When he swore — strange commentary on 

 civilization — he always used white man's oaths, French patois or 

 straight English. 



Though old hermits may be found hunting alone through the 

 Rockies, Idaho, Washington, and Minnesota, trappers do not 

 usually go to the wilds alone ; but there was so little danger in 

 rabbit-snaring that Koot had gone out accompanied by only the 

 mongrel dog that had drawn his provisions from the fort on a sort 

 of toboggan sleigh. 



The snow is a white page on which the wild creatures write 

 their daily record for those who can read. All over the white 

 swamp were little deep tracks ; here, holes as if the runner had 

 sunk ; there, padded marks as from the bound — bound — bound 

 of something soft ; then, again, where the thicket was like a hedge 

 with only one breach through, the footprints had beaten a little 

 hard rut walled by the soft snow. Koot's dog might have detected 

 a motionless form under the thicket of spiny shrubs, a form that 

 was gray almost to whiteness and scarcely to be distinguished from 

 the snowy underbrush but for the blink of a prism light — the 

 rabbit's eye. If the dog did catch that one telltale glimpse of an 

 eye which a cunning rabbit would have shut, true to the training 

 of his trapper master he would give no sign of the discovery except 

 perhaps the pricking forward of both ears. Koot himself pre- 

 served as stolid a countenance as the rabbit playing dead or simu- 

 lating a block of wood. Where the footprints ran through the 

 breached hedge, Koot stooped down and planted little sticks across 

 the runway till there was barely room for a weasel to pass. Across 

 the open he suspended a looped string hung from a twig bent so 

 that the slightest weight in the loop would send it up with a death 

 jerk for anything caught in the tightening twine. 



