FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Sept. 22, 1900. 
An Old Sweetheart of Mine. 
The Parson is not looking through the window to- 
day. No! the parsonage has been deserted for a time 
and seems but a dim memory down on the Kansas 
prairies, a thousand miles away. In fact the Parson is 
something of a shiftless wanderer, with no fixed pur- 
pose. He has purposes enough and they are honorable 
enough, but, ah! too often abandoned at the dictation of 
fate, a frivilous little flirt who seems to have complete 
control of his doings. A strong, purposeful man as the 
world looks at him, the Parson is under the spell of the 
siren. 
All the world knows how strong men have been led 
astray at the beck of some so-called siren. It is thus 
with the Parson. He has been flirting with an old sweet- 
heart^not altogether a criminal flirtation, as the follow- 
ing tale will disclose, but dangerously near it. 
The scene is laid in the brush lands bordering the Red 
River wheat fields on the east. The weather has been 
■dry all summer to that extent that it has materially re- 
duced the rank growth of vegetation that usually virgates 
the face of nature in this country. Recent rains have 
dampened the earth till the roads are just moist and 
hard enough to make driving pleasant, while the air is 
cool and invigorating. Like tlie story that was to last 
forever, a description of this country can be given in a 
few words. In the place of the words which run "and 
then another locust came in and carried off another grain 
of corn," you have but to saj^, "a swale, meadow and 
poplar grove beyond," and so on seemingly over all the 
earth. 
If you journey to the eastward of Thief River and 
continue far to the northeast, the thickets will grad- 
ually become forest and the meadows will become 
marshes, wide and sometimes impassable. Tamarack 
swamps will also come to be a feaure of the landscape. 
The black, lumbering hulk of a moose crossing a marsh, 
is liable to break the monotony, or the more graceful 
figure of deer or caribou shows you that there is more 
than mosquitoes in that vast wilderness. 
Bear and elk are not unknown, as numerous mounted 
specimens in all the hotels and restaurants in the vil- 
lages bordering that land of swamp and tangle clearly 
attest. But my route leads to the westward, where the 
copse becomes smaller and the marsh a meadow, and 
finally prairie level and far-reaching, and at last breaks 
away into an endless chain of wheat fields. 
The weather conditions have a great deal to do with 
it. I have driven over the same trail twice when first 
it was a dream; next a horrible nightmare. On such 
days, when nightmare conditions are on, mosquitoes 
swarm up from the roadside and buzz about one's ears; 
there are pools of brackish water standing in the deeper 
depressions of the swales; there is no breeze to drive the 
mosquitoes away; there is no freshness in the air to 
fortify one's weakness against the murky heat and against 
•fflie onslaught of the mosquitoes; hence the nightmare. 
One can stand almost any kind of hardship when the 
breeze from the north rustles the poplar leaves as it 
passes freighted with the freshness that makes life sweet. 
Is it any wonder then that I was thrown into something 
of a delirium when a personage of the feminine gender 
whom I had known and flirted with in those days of yore 
strutted across the road in front of me? The shock of 
that old first love went tlirough me like a bolt from the 
thunder riven clouds. 
It made no difference to me that this old sweetheart 
of mine was followed by sOme half-dozen lusty youngsters, 
except perhaps that my passion was intensified by their 
presence. I had a splendid Smith & Wesson revolver 
under the buggy cushion, and my hand involuntarily 
sought the handle, for I felt reasonably sure that I could 
snip the head from the mother or any of her six hopefuls, 
and then it occurred to me that the law read, "Sharptail 
grouse, Sept. i to Nov. i," and this was only Aug. i. Thus 
the remembrance of the law deterred me from figuring in 
the "brief mentions" of the day column under the caption 
of "Shot His Sweetheart." _ 
An hour after I was spinning along the road, which 
followed a sand ridge, and was almost arched in by 
whispering poplars, when it occurred to me that I must 
be close to a small lake where five years before I had 
camped for a week. The place was an ideal cold-weather 
camp in a dense poplar thicket. It was Nov. i, and the 
ducks that passed in their flight before the wrath of 
Boreas were sure to stop in that wide reach of marsh, 
with here and there a patch of open water amid the fields 
of bulrushes, grass and canes. 
The best point of all to call the wandering pilgrim to a 
brief halt was within a hundred wards of the poplar 
thicket, where the tent was pitched. There were a dozen 
decoys bobbing in an open stretch of water close to the 
edge of the marsh. A convenient bunch of capes made a 
good blind on solid bog, and a bunch of hay shielded who- 
ever sat or knelt in it from the dampness beneath. It 
had been cold and blustering all day, and toward night 
the wind increased and the cold became more searching, 
while here and there a flake of snow sifted and eddied 
ghost-like from the leaden clouds. 
Of the four persons who had helped to locate the 
camp three had de-serted, and the Parson was holding the 
fort alone. Most of the southing birds had passed, and 
few that had made their summer home there still re- 
mained. Now and then a single or pair would rise above 
the rushes, and circling a while would drop back again 
in some other locality. Again a flock would come over 
three or four hundred yards in the air and pass as if they 
had never seen the lake, would finally turn, and breasting 
the wind drop down, making several wide sweeps and 
drop gracefully in among the decoys. 
Once a flock dropped close inshore, and climbing on 
an old log sat a solid row of shiny green heads within 10 
feet of the Parson. Then with his characteristic grim 
humor the Parson loomed up out of the rushes like a 
great specter and shouted, "Shoo!" and they shooed. 
Such was the memory. Now, winding away through 
the poplars the Parson fell to wondering if he could tell 
Vv'here to turn off to reach the lake. It was a wild spot. 
human kind seldom came tiiat way. At lufit in.<irincr 
seemed to tell him he must be near the place, and turn- 
ing into an opening on the west he drove as far as the 
teams could be driven, and getting out tied them to a tree 
and followed on through the narrow opening. The un- 
derbrush had grown up and filled the path, but there can 
be no doubt of the place, for there is an old stump where 
a tree has been cut out of the way. A moment later he 
is standing behind the fringe of grass that has grown 
up around the old boat landing. Cautiously parting the 
screen of grass, the Parson peers through. 
There is the old log, and strung along its entire length 
is a flock of ducks, gray, feeble looking things, com- 
pared to the shiny feathers and bright green heads of that 
flock of other days, but mallards just the same. When the 
Parson steps from behind his screen of grass and stands 
revealed with a loud "Shoo, there!" the birds plunge 
from the log and go flapping and quacking away in 
great alarm, while the old one flops frantically about in 
the water between the Parson and her brood, trailing a 
wing as if badly wounded, until the last of her youngsters 
has disappeared, "and then she, too, quietly slips away 
and all is still. 
Take Minnesota north from the headwaters of the 
Mississippi and east of Thief River Falls, and it is the 
most impassable country one could well imagine ; yet 
efforts ai'c continually being made to settle it up. This 
season has been exceptionally dry, and settlements have 
crept back into the swamps for sixty miles to the north- 
east of Thief River Falls. When the spring floods come 
that country will all be under water, and the settlers 
will come floating down out of there on rafts, logs or 
anything that will float them, like drowned out musk- 
rats. The misery that attends these floods more than 
offsets any good that can come from settling the country. 
This would have made one of the greatest natural 
game preserves in America. All kinds of ducks and 
grouse are numerous. It is an ideal breeding and feed- 
ing grounds for both moose and deer; bear and caribou 
are still plenty, though killed by the hundred by settlers 
for food during the spring and summer months. 
There must be at least twenty-five mounted moose 
heads in Thief River Falls, and not the tenth part of the 
heads ever came out of the swamps. When one thinks 
of all the misery attendant on the settling up of this 
country, and all the benefits of leaving it untouched, this 
would have been a scheme beside which Mr. Cristadoro's 
plan of a reserve on the headwaters of the Mississippi 
would have paled into insignificance. Yet Mr. Q-ista- 
doro's scheme seems far ahead of the average of human 
intelligence, and though to a man far up in the forks of 
a Cottonwood tree it looks as if the park measure was 
beaten, still I shall hope it will carry through. God 
speed the just and crush the unjust, is the Parson's 
prayer ; not long or eloquent, but to the point. 
When the Parson came through the proposed park 
the other day on the Great Northern fast train it seemed 
a brief space" between what I shall be pleased to term the 
axe desert and the axe desert again. Just a few stalwart 
primeval Norway, white and spruce pine, and then again 
into the axe desert. As the train halted for a brief time 
at Cass Lake I wondered at the crowds that swarmed 
there. Were these people gathered in expectancy of the 
opening of the pine lands of the Leech Lake Reservation? 
I thought a moment, and decided that to be the case. 
If my decision was correct, the lumberman must have 
full assurance of the outcome, in which case the park 
scheme is done for. This brings up the question to us 
old has-beens who love to pluck flowers fresh from the 
hand of nature unbent by the tramp of greed. Whence 
now' The Parson. 
A Teepee Tale. 
"Dis storm.s, he put me in de mine of one time when 
'nodder storms been, long, long time ago 'fore I'll been a 
marry mans," said Washakie Jo as he poked a splinter 
into a lodge fire and lit his black pipe, 
"Yessir, dat time he'll been 'bout de las' of Jo, sure; 
I'll fought so, anyhow, he continued, as he stretched at 
full length on the pile of buffalo robes and furs heaped 
up against the wind wall that his squaw had put up in- 
side the lodge. 
I knew that Jo had a yarn to spin by the way he 
smoked, and I also knew that the best way to hear that- 
yarn was to let Jo have his own way — to pay not attention 
to the greasy little half-breed — just give him titne when he 
was in the mood, you know, for there was a big per cent, 
of Indian blood uiader that smoke-tanned hide_ of his 
and every one knows that you can't hurry an Indian. 
That is, every one who is wise knows it, so I smoked 
and waited in silence. 
Outside the teepee walls there was a wailing of wind 
and the tinkle of storm-driven snow crystals hurrying 
by to add their mite to the dim drifts growing higher 
under the lee of the switch willows; and I knew that the 
gaunt, black, skeleton cottonwoods were dancing in 
rythmic order as they bowed and bent and rattled tlieir 
bones in the fury of the passing blizzard. 
The teepee shook and shivered in the gusts and anon 
the ghostly smoke puffed back and filled the smoke hole 
over our heads and then rushed upward and outward in 
the storm currents a moment later. 
It was snug and warm in there in the dim firelight, 
thanks to the skill of the silent Mrs. Jo, who now 
squatted down on the furs across the fire and looked 
like an old, dim painting that had all faded away but 
the bright bits where a fragment of blanket or barbaric 
finery caught the glint of the red firelight. She sat 
silent, immovable as a graven image, except when there 
was a movement from the little sleeping form cuddled 
for all the world like a white baby in the mass of furs 
by her side. There was something pathetic about this 
dark woman of the wilderness who did drudgery and 
bore the children of Washakie Jo. She loved him. top. I 
suppose, in a stoical, animal way, in spite of his dirt, 
his brutality and the bad whiskey that came into the 
teepee when the fUrs went out in the spring at the little 
trading post perched in the shadow of the fort down there 
where the hurrying yellow river bit at the clay banks 
and tumbled them dovi^n, then hurried on out of the 
West and on into the East forever, 
Bv and by when the black pipe smoked freely Jo bega'n: 
"Yessir, t|Jit Wfis fi bftrrstotmff ciat tttne. 1-11 been 
wolfin' an' trap for de beaver an' git once tti While' one 
bears, mebbe two sometimes — dere was good deal bears 
dat time 'roun' in de Bad Lan's .in de fall — an' I'll had 
good luck. I'll gat plenty furs an' plenty robe, for dere 
good deal buffaloes yet. So I'll t'ought dat's good 
place for winter dere an' I'll builds me good shack for , 
live in it in cole wedder. Dat's on one little creeks — ^he 
run to de Little Mizouri, on'y no water in him — on'y' " 
some time long pon'. 
"Dat kine of place I'll builds dis shack; I'll gat plenty- 
wood, plenty water, plenty evert'ing. An' back on de 
hill dere'll be good deal cedar patches in de canyons — 
good place for de black-tail deers come when de snow 
get deep an' drive him down from de open country. 
"So I'll see all dese t'ing an' I'll t'ought dere'll been 
good place for live, an' I'll mek de shack in de side of 
de bank an' make good log front on him. 
"By an' by I'll got all de grub an' de trap an' all de 
powder an' de lead an' de pizen for de wolf, an' plenty 
terbac for de smoke, an' I'll pack him all to de shack; 
den I'll turned de boss loose for rustle for his own grub 
till de spring an' I'll set down here for live. 
"Well, dat's all right. I'll go out an' kill de deer' an' 
de an'lope an'_ put in de pizen for strong so dat he'll be 
good wolf bait when he'll frozed up. Well, seh, dat'll 
be all right, an' I'll get good deal wolf skin 'fore long, 
when juss frosty yet, an' den he'll come one big snow — 
de firs' one — an' mek de hill all white an' de cedar he'll 
be all blue like de sky, on'y like under de big storm 
cloud, dat kine blue dat'll be good deal black. 
"An' den dere'll be. de trail all 'roun' de hill an' de 
cedar an' de little Avillow in de crick bottom, an' I'll .see 
dere is plenty game an' I'll t'ought dat's good an' I'll 
been one smart mans for pick dis kine place for Avinter in. 
"Den I'll kill more deers an' rack de pizen in him right 
'way 'fore he'll got cole, an' I'll do dis kine o' way 'bout - 
fifteen mile 'cross de country &ti* 'long de crick an' fix 
it like dat. 
"By 'n' by de snow come more an' dat'll mek. it hard 
for travel an' wear de moc'sin purty bad for come back 
to de shack over night, so I'll mek de sled for pack de 
blanket an' de grub an' I'll goin' out den for t'rec, four 
day meby 'fore I'll come back. 
"Well, dat's all right, for I'll mek de camp in dc liT 
canyon an' fix him good so I'll sleeps, no matter for de 
cole, an' I'll got plenty skins. 
"Den one time I'll been out for free day an' on'y 
got de grub for one day for get back to de cabin, daf 5 
air an' de skins — he's all tied up in de tree where de 
wolf he can't get him, de cache, for pick him up when 
I'll go back to de shack. 
"Yessir; an' when de night cotne I'll mek de tamp in 
de li'l' deep canyon daf 11 run 'crdss de way o' de sun 
an' I'll bring good deal wood. You see, de sky he'll 
doti't look ver' .good; look lak dat's big storms on de 
way, an' I'll not feel purty good so far 'way from de 
shack. 
"Well, I'U set up an' smoke a long time by de fire an' 
de air kine o' warm an' he'll don't snow. So den I'll 
t'ought mebbe goin' for be thew an' I'll roll in de blanket 
an' sleeps. 
"Well, sir, de nex' mornin' de blanket he'll felt jmrty 
warm an' ebcr't'ing he'll been so quiety when I'll woke 
up, an' sir dere'll be snow on de blanket one hand deep, 
an' still he snow an* d© W?in' he blow hard up 'long de 
cedars on he hill. : 
"An den he'll bin corer an' col'er an' all de groun' 
he'll be white an' on'y can see liT way, like de fog. 
"Well, I'll mek de coffee an' fry de meat an' mek liT 
smoke in de pipe, an' all de time he'll get cot'er an' 
col'er all de time. 
"I'll fought 'bout dis storms an' de grub an' all de 
f ings an' I'll mek up my mine for go to de shack quick; 
juss cache de sled an' de hides an' take 'long de gun 
an' de liT grub '11 got lef. 
"Well, seh, I'll strike out an' travel hard for de shack, 
an' all de time de win' blow more an' more an' de cole 
come strong so dat by'mby I'll begin for get cole an' 
den I'll get mine for juss stop an' res' an' meby go to 
sleep dere in de storms an' sleep till de snow stop. 
"I'll fight dis feel for 'long time, for I'll know dat's 
bad sign an' must get to de shack. Well, I'll come to de 
li'l crick den an' I'll t'ought I'll be so tire I'll stop an' 
res' an' b'il' de big fire for get warm, an' daf 11 be mos' 
night. 
"So I'll b'il' de fire an' set down, an' den come de 
sleepy an' I'll walk an' stamp de foots an' swing de arm 
for keep awake, an' de dark come. 
"Well, seh, I'll fought dat I'll had to stop dere all 
night an' be 'wake for keep up de fire, an' den by'm'by 
I'll got warm an' set down for smoke an' cat de liT 
biscuit an' de jerked ven'son, an' I'll feel better. 
"Den I'll smoke de pipe, an' 'fore I'U 'member I'll 
gone right to sleep dere in de storms. 
"Den I'll sleepy li'l while dere, I guess so, an' den 
I'll woke up quick, for somefing he'll bite my foots an' 
I'll see big wolfs all cover by de snow aii' got de green 
in de eye an' red in de mouse, an', seh, he'll pull my 
foots in his tooths an' dat'll be all shiny white like de 
fros', too. 
"Well, I'll be good deal scare, I'll guess so. An' dere'll 
be good deal more wolfs — one, two, free, plenty wolfs — 
all 'roun', an' de fire all gone on'y li'l' bitsy smoke. 
"Den I'll grab de gun an' jtunps roun' an holler an' 
de wolfs he'll ron away li'l way an' on'y show his red 
tongue an' his mouse all snarly like he'll be hungry. 
"Well, seh, I'll be good deal scare dere in de storms, 
cos I'll know dat wolfs he'll get over bein' 'fraid in liT 
while an' den maby he'll jomp an' pull me dow^n for eat, 
cos he'll git so hongry on de storm. 
"I'll not be tire now. I'll git de Wood all fix for de 
fire, an' den I'll foun' out I'll got ajl my match wet from 
de snow in my pocket an' I'll feel in de terbacker pouch 
for de li'l' iron box for carry de dry match in when need 
'em bad, an' seh, I'll loss it! 
"An' den I'll got pretty bad scare ail' I'll .look roun' 
for Cottonwood trjce for eljnibi it if .Jlat wftlfs. he^'Il bod- 
der me. 
"On'y iuss li'l' tree dere so big my leg, an' I'll qfan' 
dere in de storms an' de wolf he'll all stan' roun' an' 
show his moiuse an' juss wait iw de storms for mp to fell 
down in de snow; den he'll know he'll eat m<- up an' 
have no. trouble's for do it. 
■ 'mW, eeli, X\\ stiin* It .iii'=' long n'^ I'll cati an' I'll 
