12 Sport and Life. 



The genuine trapper was a very different being, his unobtrusive 

 and taciturn manners in the presence of strangers being a ready 

 means of recognising the right sort. 



Of the old guard of famous Rocky Mountains voyageurs there 

 were, even then, but very few left ; the two or three I got to know 

 were grizzly septuagenarians. The younger race were generally 

 men who had passed a long apprenticeship under old veterans. 

 The genuine trappers were rarely met with in the haunts of frontier 

 civilisation. They were out all the year round, visiting outlying 

 settlements only every six months to renew their stock of "grub." 

 Many of them had not slept in a bed for years, and they loved not 

 the luxuries of civilisation, living a life as independent of social 

 fetters as it is well possible to imagine. Very few of them ever 

 married, though many took to themselves dusky daughters of the 

 soil, a proceeding which earned for them the title of " squaw men," 

 and generally resulted in a total cutting loose from white men's 

 companionship. Death, which had stared them in the face times 

 out of number, finally surprised them in the shape of scalp-hunting 

 redskins, or a fierce eight-day snowstorm in a shelterless region, or 

 an infuriated she grizzly, or in any one of the many other guises in 

 which the grim master is w r ont to call in the lonely hunter's checks. 

 Few missed them ; and when one failed to put in his appearance at 

 the frontier store where, in spring and autumn, he was in the habit 

 of purchasing his modest " grub outfit," a casual " Guess the old 

 stag has gone up ! " and a regretful sigh on the part of the enter- 

 prising owner of the general emporium where the unworldly old 

 buck used to trade his valuable peltry for third-class flour and 

 adulterated coffee, was about all that mankind spared for the 

 wanderer. 



Among these rough and uncouth "tramps of the wilderness," 

 beneath a very shaggy exterior there lay hidden many of the large- 

 hearted qualities of ideal man in his primitive state. You found 

 among them men true men on whose word one could build, and 

 on whose quiet, cool-headed, though subdued, courage you could 

 implicitly depend. Happily, not a fe\v of our best sportsmen who 



