AN INDIAN HUNTER. 283 



[It is true, however, that much of the glory of the Indian 

 hunter has departed. Not only are wild beasts becoming 

 scarcer in the North American forests, but the waste and 

 the wilderness are rapidly disappearing before the steady 

 advance of civilization. Many of the Indian tribes have 

 abandoned a nomadic life, and no longer trust for their 

 support to the products of the chase or of fishing : they 

 live in the towns, adopting various occupations, or cluster 

 together in the neighbouring villages, tilling the ground 

 after the white man's fashion. And where the passion 

 for, and the necessity of, hunting still exists, the intro- 

 duction of the rifle and gunpowder has taken away so 

 much of the excitement of the sport as formerly arose 

 from its evident danger. To confront a bison with a gun 

 that will kill at two hundred or three hundred yards is a 

 very different matter from facing it with bow and arrow 

 that will not prove fatal at more than half that distance. 

 We have already quoted from Longfellow's " Hiawatha." 

 The reader will remember, perhaps, the picture of an 

 Indian hunter given in that charming poem : 



" He could shoot ten arrows upward, 

 Shoot them with such strength and swiftness, 

 That the tenth had left the bow-string 



Ere the first to earth had fallen ! 



From his lodge went Hiawatha, 

 Dressed for travel, armed for hunting ; 

 Dressed in deer-skin shirt and leggings, 

 Richly wrought with quills and wampum ; 

 On his head his eagle-feathers, 

 Round his waist the belt of wampum, 

 In his hand his bow of ash-wood, 

 Strung with sinews of the reindeer ; 

 In his quiver oaken arrows, 

 Tipped with jasper, winged with feathers." 



It may safely be said that such a picture is now impossible, 

 and that the Indian hunter of to-day, compared with this 



