ioo The Winning of the West 



stretches of gloomy woodland. It was not an open 

 forest. The underbrush grew, dense and rank, be- 

 tween the boles of the tall trees, making a cover 

 so thick that it was in many places impenetrable, so 

 thick that it nowhere gave a chance for human eye 

 to see even as far as a bow could carry. No horse 

 could penetrate it save by following the game trails 

 or paths chopped with the axe; and a stranger ven- 

 turing a hundred yards from a beaten road would be 

 so helplessly lost that he could not, except by the 

 merest chance, even find his way back to the spot he 

 had just left. Here and there it was broken by a 

 rare hillside glade or by a meadow in a stream val- 

 ley; but elsewhere a man might travel for weeks as 

 if in a perpetual twilight, never once able to see the 

 sun through the interlacing twigs that formed a 

 dark canopy above his head. 



This dense forest was to the Indians a home in 

 which they had lived from childhood, and where 

 they were as much at ease as a farmer on his own 

 acres. To their keen eyes, trained for generations 

 to more than a wild beast's watchfulness, the wil- 

 derness was an open book ; nothing at rest or in mo- 

 tion escaped them. They had begun to track game 

 as soon as they could walk ; a scrape on a tree trunk, 

 a bruised leaf, a faint indentation of the soil, which 

 the eye of no white man could see, all told them a 

 tale as plainly as if it had been shouted in their 

 ears. 14 With moccasined feet they trod among brit- 



14 To this day the wild not the half- tame Indians remain 

 unequaled as trackers. Even among the old hunters not 



