§44 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[May 3, 1902.. 
ness also," he continued. "Just come out here a minute." 
I went with him to a ridge a couple of hundred yards 
back of the cabin, which extended from the breaks down 
across the bottom to the river. Along its crest was a 
well-worn trail. "Just look at those tracks in the dust 
and tell me what made them," he said. 
"Why, bighorn," I exclaimed. "There have been a lot 
of them along here recently, and from the looks of the 
tracks some, of them were big rams." 
"Exactly. They come down here for water every night, 
but I have never seen them on their way to or from the 
river. They are too wise to make the trip in the daytime. 
Whenever I go up in the breaks, however, I always see 
one or more bunches of them." 
The country back of Herman's ranch is an ideal place 
for sheep, as it is a tangled network of deep coulees and 
high ridges, of rocky buttes and rough cliffs. Some Of 
these deep coulees extend southward toward the Yellow- 
stone for twenty miles. The bighorn in these bad lands 
rut in October, and bring forth their young in March, two 
months earlier, in each case than the bighorn of the 
Rockies, only two to three hundred miles away. The 
difference in the altitude is the reason for this. The 
trees along the Missouri are in leaf before the snow dis- 
appears from the mountain slopes. Herman said that he 
saw rams with the ewes the latter part of September. 
On a recent ramble back in the breaks he had found the 
remains of a yearling ram killed by a mountain lion, and 
said that he frequently saw tracks of the big cats along 
the river bars. 
We stopped with Ed. oer night, and were early afloat. 
At the lower end of his flat the river enters a narrow 
canon, and the strips of bottom land are barren except 
for the ever-present growth of sage. Here and there a 
few cottonwoods and willows grow near the water's edge, 
but there is not enough timber to shelter the brush-loving 
whitetail deer for a distance of thirty miles, where, at the 
Round Butte, the valley widens out again and the bot- 
toms support large groves of cottonwoods. Yet this 
thirty-mile stretch is one of the most picturesque parts 
of the river. From Herman's ranch to the mouth of 
Seven Blackfeet Creek, the southern rim of the valley is 
one continuous cliff of. sandstone, pierced by walled 
coulees, capped with a lovely fringe of green timber. And 
on the slopes, below the frowning walls, stretches the 
heaviest growth of pines and firs of any we had seen. 
An ideal mule deer country, I thought, and the numerous 
tracks of the animals along the -bars proved that I was 
right. At the mouth of the Seven Blackfeet we found 
a small clump of cottonwoods, enough to shelter a tent 
and furnish a little fuel, and after scraping over a wide, 
shallow bar, we managed to make a landing within a few 
yards of them. We put up the tent on a bit of grass 
land under the trees and got everything in shape for the 
night, as I had determined to spend the day prowling 
around in the breaks. 
On the State map this little stream is marked Quarrel 
Creek, but its right name is as I have given it. Years 
ago a party of seven of the Piegan branch of the Black- 
feet were crossing the flat here one day, on their way to 
raid the camp of the Yanktonais, further down the river. 
As luck would have it, a very large party of the Sioux, 
traveling up the river, saw them, and waiting until they 
were on the barren flat, charged down out of the breaks 
and hemmed them in. There was nothing behind which 
the besieged party could shelter themselves ; they had no 
time to dig pits with their knives. They realized, 110 
doubt, that their time had come, but they met the end 
bravely, shooting at the enemy with careful aim, singing 
the war song with spirit, falling one by one on the barren 
plain until all were dead, when the Sioux rushed in and 
took their scalps, their weapons and war finery. Five of 
the Sioux also fell during the brief battle, and three more 
were wounded. 
The Seven Blackfeet is not much of a stream, al- 
though it is nearly forty miles in length, rising far to the 
south in the rough country toward the Yellowstone. The 
bottom through which it flows into the Missouri is nearly 
four miles long, but less than a mile wide, and is 
covered with a dense growth of high sagebrush. The 
previous winter, riding by on the oposite side of the 
river, Herman and a friend of his had counted a band of 
sixty-three bighorn on the flat, all grown animals, the 
kids being invisible in the tall sage. There were many 
fresh signs of them along the shore where we camped, as 
well as plenty of mule deer tracks, and when I started 
out for the breaks after an early lunch, I felt sure that 
I would see some of them. Crossing the flat I began to 
climb the sloping point on the right, or west side of the 
creek. For the most part the soil was barren, and after 
the last rain it had dried hard on the surface, so that one 
could almost imagine he was walking on crusted snow, it 
crunched with a sound exactly like it. 
Part way up the ridge a band of mule deer which had 
been lying in a patch of junipers got wind of trie, and 
disappeared into a deep coulee before I could get a shot. 
When I next saw them they were a quarter of a mile away 
on the opposite side of the creek. I kept on up the hill 
without stopping until I reached the crest, and found 
myself on a long backbone or ridge running parallel with 
the river. Deep-timbered coulees, cut cliffs, were the 
general features upon each side of it, and not far west- 
ward of where I stood, rising above the level of the 
ridge, stood a massive block of sandstone, aptly named 
from its shape the Cabin Butte. Its sides are nearly rec- 
tangular walls, and its top is shaped like an ordinary roof. 
All around the base of the great rock I found many tracks 
of bighorn, old and fresh, and their beds, shallowly 
scooped in the sandy earth. One gets a fine view from 
here both of the Missouri and the valley of the Seven 
Blackfeet, walled with sandstone cliffs. Thousands of 
coulees run into it; away toward its headwaters odd- 
shaped buttes, some pine-covered, loom up above the gen- 
eral level of the plain. And away to. the southwest can 
be seen the Bull Mountains, as we used to call them, but 
which are marked Piny Buttes on recent maps. 
After resting and enjoying a smoke, I descended the 
south side of the ridge and kept on through a rough lot 
of hills and cliffs for a mile or more, scaring up two^ small 
bands of bighorn, and one bunch of mule 'deer. Then I 
crossed the creek valley and began to work toward camp 
.through the heads of the coulees and the hills on that 
side. The first thing I ran across here was a bear track 
several days old, but a sure proof that bruin was some- 
where around in the breaks. I had got into an exceed- 
ingly rottgh bit of country, cut walls and nearly perpen- 
dicular-sided cou!6es, when I ran across a bunch of five 
mule deer, one of them a goodly buck. They rose up out 
of some stunted pines and stood staring at me, and I 
raised the rifle, when I suddenly realized that if I killed 
the buck I would have a difficult task to get him out of 
the breaks and over the four miles to camp. So I didn't 
shoot, but slung my hat at them instead and enjoyed see- 
ing them stilt away up the coulee. Mule deer are cer- 
tainly ungraceful jumpers. From there On to camp I saw 
nothing of any kind of game except numerous tracks, 
much to -my surprise, and then I regretted not having 
shot the buck back in the breaks, for we were out of meat. 
Yet, when I raised the tent flaps I met a savory odor of 
something roasting in the stove oven, and upon sitting 
down to the spread of good things which was ready, found 
that Sah-ne-to had been on a little hunt herself ; the re- 
sult, two fat cottontails nicely dressed, broken down flat 
and roasted with a few crisp slices of breakfast bacon on 
top of the brown, tender meat. She said that while I was 
away in the hills three deer had come down to water on 
the opposite side of the river, and then gone back into the 
breaks. 
After dinner was over it still lacked an hour to sunset, 
so Sah-ne-to and I strolled down along the shore for about 
a mile, to a small dry island, which has a few scatter- 
ing trees upon it. The shores and sandbar thereabouts 
were all cut up with trails and tracks of sheep and deer, 
and I felt sure we would soon see some game of some 
kind. We sat down in a patch of short willows and I 
gave Sah-ne-to the rifle, telling her it was her turn to 
kill a deer. She had fired one shot only once before, and 
protested that she would be sure to miss. The time re- 
ferred to, a coyote had come nosing around our house 
when she happened to be there alone, and she had mis- 
tered up courage to take a shot at it, whereupon the ani- 
mal had run away down the creek at top speed. A week 
later we found a dead coyote about half a mile from the 
ranch. "There," she exclaimed, "that must be my coyote ; 
it looks exactly like the one I shot at." 
We told her that all coyotes looked alike, but upon 
examining the carcass found a bullet hole clear, through 
it. and concluded that she had killed it. 
Wc sat quietly in the willows for half an hour or 
more, and then a lone doe mule deer appeared on the 
bank. We could see only her head and brisket as she 
looked up and down, and back whence she came. After a 
little, satisfied that everything was as it should be, she 
came out of the sagebrush and started down the bank to 
the water, and then we saw that there were others — nine, 
in fact, all does and fawns. Sah-ne-to was excited. 
"Which one will I shoot ?" she asked, raising and cocking 
the rifle. "None," I replied. "Don't you see that there 
is no buck among them?" 
"Yes, but also I know there is no meat in camp. I will 
try to hit that nearest fawn." 
It was all I could do to keep her from shooting. The 
deer went to the river's edge just above the island, drank 
their fill, nosed around and slowly reclimbed the bank, 
fading away into the sagebrush as stealthily as they had 
come. Then I read Sah-ne-to a short lecture on game 
preservation. "The does," I said, "should not be killed 
unless a person absolutely needs the meat. If we were 
starving, it would be different. There are plenty of deer 
here along the river, and no doubt we will get a "buck this 
evening or to-morrow." 
We saw none, however, although we remained on the 
Island until dusk, and then returned to camp. The night 
was chilly, and a good fire in the stove made the tent very 
comfortable. Away down the river we heard the honk, 
honk of an approaching flock of geese, and then their soft, 
satisfied guttural murmuring as they lit on the bar not 
far below. A couple of owls in the nearby trees asked 
each other "Who? Who?" and then somewhere out on 
the flat a band of wolves serenaded us. Is there anything 
more melancholy than their deep and long-drawn cry? 
One can well imagine that they are mourning for the 
days that are gone — days of the buffalo and a plenty of all 
the wild things which were their prey. If so, they are not 
alone. There are others — white men as well as Indians — ■ 
who would gladly see the towns and the ranches and the 
railroads swept from the face of the earth, if they could 
once more roam these plains, as they were before all such 
things came to be. No luxuries of modern civilized life 
can make up for the simple contentment of those other 
times. 
"Listen," said Sah-ne-to. "What causes that splashing 
in the river ?" 
We went outside, and in the dim moonlight could see 
a commotion out in the middle of the stream, a splashing 
and rippling of the water, but not the object which caused 
ic. "Oh," I remarked, "it's probably a beaver, or maybe 
an otter playing with its young. Let's go back inside ; it is 
cold out here." 
Sah-ne-to stirred the fire and put a fresh stick in the 
stove. "Yes," she said, thoughtfully, "it might have been 
a beaver or an otter, as you say, but it seems to me that 
there was more splashing and noise in the water than 
either of those animals could have made. I believe it was 
a su-yi-tup-pi [literally, under-water person]. This is 
the time, a moonlight night, when they come to the sur- 
face and play around." 
"What are they like?" I asked. "Did any of your 
people ever see one?" 
"Indeed they did," she replied. "Long ago the camp 
was pitched on that stream in the north we Call the Elk 
River. One day a man sitting on the edge of a high cut 
bank happening to look down in the great clear pool be- 
low, saw a strange-looking object moving around in the 
depths. He could not see it clearly, it was so far beneath 
the surface, bvft he thought it must be one of the su-yi- 
top-pi, and he hastened to call the people. When they 
arrived, and cautiously peered over the edge of the bank, 
it had come up quite near the surface, and was resting on 
its back, its arms crossed behind its head. It was a man, 
far taller than any man who walks on the land, and quite 
slender in proportion to its height. It had a white 
skin, and its long, light hair, eddying and waving in the 
water, completely veiled its^face, so that no one saw it. 
For a little time, while the people gazed at it in fear and 
wonder, it rested nearly motionless, and then slowly mak- 
ing a couple of strokes with its hands, sank down and 
down, and disappeared in the blue depths. 
"There were more of them here in this river than any 
other one, but after the steamboats began to run they be- 
came scarce. The old men say that, the great wheels of th 
boats struck and killed many of them. Once somewhefil 
on this river, I think it was below the Great Roar [Gre&l 
Falls], a party in search of berries saw a woman sittinjS 
on a big rock out in the stream. She also had wonder fullll 
long and thick light colored hair, which" fell over anci 
covered her face completely, and through which could bii 
seen only here and there the white gleam of her breast^! 
Seeing the people coming along the shore, she quickh 
slid off the rock and sank out of sight. 
"The wise men say that the su-yi-top-pi do not eaj 
persons, for the bodies of the unfortunates they drag 
down to their death are generally found without a bruis; 
or mark of any kind. Otters, fish and hell divers const'.' 
tute their food; and also the mussels. One time whe| 
the people were traveling south to hunt in the Yellotf 
Creek country, they came to the ford 011 the Missouf 
right where the wagon bridge at Great Falls now stand* 
As they approached the bank they saw a number of otter' 
hastening down stream over the ford, and one very larg< 
one, which seemed to be the leader, kept throwing him/ 
self out of the water and making a queer noise, as % 
urging the others on. They all seemed to be scared a| 
something. Now, when the chiefs and the medicine men 
and some of the great warriors, who were in the lead, rode 
to the shore, their horses instead of walking into the 
water, stopped and snorted, and backed up, trymg to turr 
and run. Then every one knew that some su-yi-top-p 
were out there in the river, and that they had scared the 
others. So the people went into camp right there, not 1 
daring to attempt the ford. The next day, however, the 
horses showed no fear of the river, and the camp crossed 
over and went on." 
"Well," I asked, after a little, "is that all you have f| 
tell me about them?" 
"That is all for to-night. To-morrow I wjll make their) 
a sacrifice, for we seem to be getting into their country 
Appekunny. 
A Walk Down South — XXVIL 
After a few hundred yards up a gully and along a spur 
back, I reached the timber line in Clinch Mountain and 
began to climb its steepest sides. The snow made the; 
walking slippery, but, with a buoyancy of heart I had not, 
felt in weeks, I grasped the saplings and hauled myself 
or scrambled up, sweating in spite of the chill wind. On 
the summit I looked back at the valley far below, a roll- 
ing, knoll-filled sweep of land, where one could only half 
see the houses. There was a distant glimpse of the little 
church and a clearly defined memory of the widow sitting 
among the other sisters, with her hands clasped on her 
knees, her eyes downcast under the blue sunbonnet, her' 
lips muttering a prayer too low for human ears, the ideal 
of contrition, though one could "not fancy what her sins 
could have been. 
Beyond were the ridges and valleys of a feud land, 
purple-brown forest landscape, with snow white frag- 
ments of clearing scattered over it — the look of peace and 
gentleness was upon it. It was hard to know that lurking 
through those pathed woods were men on whom rewards 
were standing because they had committed the most cow- 
ard^ of murders. For forty years an average of two 
shootings resulting in murder annually had occurred 
there, and in all that time there had been just one hang- 
ing, that of an imbecile who was hired to kill a man for* 
two dollars, it is said, by a woman. Valleys rich with 
soil, good crops, good orchards, mountains crowned by 
nature with trees and rocks not likely to be disturbed- 
it seemed a pity that justice could not find her way. 
into it. 
I paused for a little while at the house of the man 
who had showed me the Cope house from the top of 
the ridge on my way over; he was playing a violin as I 
came around to the door of his one-roomed log shack. 
Down in the valley — Poor Valley — I picked up a flint 
arrowhead of novel design. It was an inch across and an 
inch long, only with the point rounded instead of sharp- 
ened. It makes a pretty pocketpiece. The red mud was 
ankle deep. 
At Mrs. Mary Collins' I stopped for the night. She 
greeted me cordially, remembering that on my way over 
I had taken dinner with her. For supper we had corn- 
bread and fat. pork; for breakfast wheat bread and fat 
pork. A neighbor sent in to borrow some oil for a lamp, 
Mrs. Collins had none in the can, and only a little in the 
lantern ; she took a bottle, however, and at another house 
succeeded in getting half a pint. The need of the lamp 
was a sick woman who "was being watched." 
I reached Rogersville the next morning before noon, 
and Hotelman Spears greeted me heartily. 
"You know," he said, "when I heard of that shooting 
Saturday I didn't know but what yoit'd gone over there 
and began to ask questions and they'd got mad." Mail- 
and letters attended to, I came down the railroad track to 
the bridge and Mr. Steel's, where I had left my boat. 
The way ahead loomed up very heavily — measured by 
the hundreds of miles — to Knoxvilleioo or so ; to Chat- 
tanooga, 400; to Muscle Shoals, 600; to the Mississippi, 
900 ; but it was attractively uncertain beyond Chattanooga. 
It might be only a "little ways," and I did not measure 
the map ; had not the courage to do so. 
All day Sunday it rained, so I did not start out, but 
listened to many tales by Steel, who went through the 
Civil War as a Confederate soldier.- He had seen a tree 
over on Clinch River that slid end on down a mountain 
cornerwise through a mountain cabin, and had been a 
prisoner of the Federals. 
A bad cold worried me all day, but the way the Holston 
began to show yellow streaks along the banks, and be* 
gan to lift and heave down the center uneasily, was cheer- 
ing. A "tide" was coming, and I'd go boormng on my 
way with it. 
A good-by to all, I started at 9:20 o'clock on Monday 
morning, Jan. 28, somewhat regretfully, for I was in the 
heart of the fruit country of Tennessee. Mrs. Steel and 
her two daughters put six kinds of sauce on the table in 
addition to flaky biscuit, meats and pies. 
The river was a yellow, turgid, boiling flood, running, it 
seemed to me, from four to ten miles an hour. It was 
flaky, streaked with the yellow mud in it, a thin glassy 
film over the top that held dark lines of reflections It 
was curious water to look at. A glass full was about as 
