100 LIFE IN THE FAR WEST. 



Blackfeet country ; encountering many perils, often hunted 

 by the Indians, but always escaping. He had soon loaded 

 both his animals with beaver, and then thought of bending 

 his steps to some of the trading rendezvous on the other 

 side of the mountains, where employes of the Great North- 

 West Fur Company meet the trappers with the produce of 

 their hunts, on Lewis's fork of the Columbia, or one of its 

 numerous affluents. His intention was to pass the winter 

 at some of the company's trading-posts in Oregon, into 

 which country he had never yet penetrated. 



CHAPTER V. 



WE have said that La Bont6 was a philosopher : he took 

 the streaks of ill luck which checkered his mountain life 

 with perfect carelessness, if not with stoical indifference. 

 Nothing ruffled his danger-steeled equanimity of temper ; 

 no sudden emotion disturbed his mind. We have seen how 

 wives were torn from him without eliciting a groan or 

 grumble, (but such contretemps, it may be said, can scarce- 

 ly find a place in the category of ills) ; how the loss of 

 mules and mustangs, harried by horse-stealing Indians, left 

 him in the ne plus ultra of mountain misery afoot ; how 

 packs and peltries, the hard-earned beaver of his perilous 

 hunts, were " raised " at one fell swoop by freebooting bands 

 of savages. Hunger and thirst, we know, were common- 

 place sensations to the mountaineer. His storm-hardened 

 flesh scarce felt the pinging wounds of arrow-point or 

 bullet ; and when in the midst of Indian fight, it is not 

 probable that any tender qualms of feeling would allay the 

 itching of his fingers for his enemy's scalp-lock, nor would 

 any remains of civilised fastidiousness prevent his burying 

 his knife again and again in the life-blood of an Indian 

 savage. 



