CHAPTER XIII 



JOHN COLTER FREE TRAPPER 



LONG before sunrise hunters were astir in the moun 

 tains. 



The Crows were robbers, the Blackfeet murderers; 

 and scouts of both tribes haunted every mountain defile 

 where a white hunter might pass with provisions and 

 peltries which these rascals could plunder. 



The trappers circumvented their foes by setting 

 the traps after nightfall and lifting the game before 

 daybreak. 



Night in the mountains was full of a mystery that 

 the imagination of the Indians peopled with terrors 

 enough to frighten them away. The sudden stilling 

 of mountain torrent and noisy leaping cataract at sun 

 down when the thaw of the upper snows ceased, the 

 smothered roar of rivers under ice, the rush of whirl 

 pools through the blackness of some far canon, the 

 crashing of rocks thrown down by unknown forces, the 

 shivering echo that multiplied itself a thousandfold 

 and ran &quot; rocketing &quot; from peak to peak startling the 

 silences these things filled the Indian with supersti 

 tious fears. 



The gnomes, called in trapper s vernacular &quot; hoo- 

 doos &quot; great pillars of sandstone higher than a house, 

 left standing in valleys by prehistoric floods were to 

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