Hard Hunting. 
A motley crew were we—I, driven to the ever¬ 
lasting hills from the East by a pair of "busted 
bellows,” as Robert Louis Stevenson used to call 
them; Frank, an old miner, now on the retired 
list as the result of drilling into a missed shot; 
and Jim, a Piegan Indian. 
We were on the Blackfoot Indian reservation, 
in Northern Montana, where I was spending the 
summer with Hank N., squaw man and old buf¬ 
falo hunter, whose cabin was between the two 
St. Mary’s lakes. It is a wild and interesting- 
region, unsurpassed for scenery in the Rockies. 
The peaks are stupendous, rising like knife 
blades almost sheer to their very tops. Nearly 
every canon is of the box variety, hemmed in by 
precipices, and each has its glacier—not a snow 
bank, but the real thing. That at the head of the 
Upper St. Mary’s Lake is about four miles long 
and two wide. On top of the main range the 
warm moisture-laden breezes from the Japan 
current are condensed when they meet the cold, 
dry air from the Montana plains, and the result 
is an almost never-ending downpour, mostly 
snow. Hence the streams are brawling torrents. 
The spruce forests that fill the canons are ex¬ 
tremely dense and beneath them flourishes a 
chaparral that is like a jungle. Snowslides are 
frequent and the mounds of shattered tree trunks 
combined with the chaparral make the gulches 
all but impassable. There are in some valleys 
miles of this wreckage, almost without a break, 
that an army could scarcely penetrate unless 
with dynamite. The mountains separating the 
canons are 6,000 to 8,000 feet high and practically 
unscalable, so that to go from one gulch to the 
next—even on foot is usually impossible—one 
must go back to- the mouth by which he entered 
and make a detour, involving often .a journey 
of several days in order to cover an air line dis¬ 
tance of a couple of miles. 
Lakes and glaciers, the jagged sky-line, the 
dense masses of the conifers as background for 
the ice and snow, make it the most beautiful as 
well as the most terrific and rugged region in 
America. It was well worth converting into a 
national park, as lately done. And it used to 
be second to none in its fish and game. Even 
now there are quite a good many bear, elk, goat 
and' sheep and excellent fishing. But it is no 
place for a tenderfoot. The worst blizzard I 
ever saw was on this reservation at the edge of 
the foothills the 25th day of August, and winter 
really begins in September. During the “sum¬ 
mer” it freezes nearly every night, and it is apt 
to rain or snow any and every day. I once spent 
three successive days at the Kootenai Lake early 
in August, enveloped all the time in a cloud that 
dropped snow without ceasing. 
We pulled out on a Sunday. Jim, who is a 
mission school Indian, declared that this was “no 
good.” To him Sunday and Friday are hard 
luck days. He has also added the Bible, the 
Virgin Mary and a few more such matters to 
his own private galaxy of heathen deities, and 
when things used to go wrong, he would slip off 
by himself and “make medicine,” the exact nature 
of which mysterious proceeding I was never al¬ 
lowed to learn. 
The first day’s going was pretty good and we 
made eight miles, camping on a small park of 
swamp grass at the head of Red Eagle Lake, a 
beautiful sheet of water lying between two tower¬ 
ing cliffs and swarming with Dolly Varden and 
mountain trout. 
The next day it was a case of using the axe 
from early morn till dewy eve. No human foot 
had trodden here for many years. There was 
no trail, and except for a few rotting tepee 
poles there was no indication that anyone had 
ever penetrated before us. From daylight until 
dark we managed to cover five miles, reaching 
the head of the gorge just at dusk. The canon 
ended in a sheer wall, directly underneath Split 
Mountain. High up on the side of the cliff on 
a shelf of a few acres’ extent is the usual glacier. 
The face of the cliff is projected V-shape, thus 
dividing the Red Eagle gorge into two forks. 
The glacier streams fall on both sides of the V, 
dropping so far that they are transformed into 
a thin drizzle before reaching the bottom. This 
makes the head of the gulch too wet and boggy 
for spruce, and thus there are a few small patches 
of swamp grass on which our four horses man¬ 
aged to keep breath in their bodies. 
We made camp by piling up spruce boughs in 
the mire and water and stretching our wagon 
sheet over them. To step off this platform was 
to go in over one’s ankles. Dry spots there were 
none, and the boughs were all that kept our 
bedding off a sea of mud interspersed with moss 
and ferns. As night fell, the fog dropped down, 
and with it came the rain. Just as the blanket 
descended, we caught a glimpse of a goat high 
on the V above our heads. A funny picture he 
cut, squatted on his hams, like a dog, and stick¬ 
ing his head over the edge of a ledge to look 
at us. This was what we had come for. 
This trip our commissariat had in it nothing 
but salt pork, flour with baking powder and 
coffee. It often had less, so that the big huckle¬ 
berries that grow here in great luxuriance were 
very welcome. In a region where fresh vege¬ 
tables are practically unobtainable, the craving 
for this sort of provender is well nigh insatiable. 
After subsisting for weeks on wild meat and 
flour I have eaten big raw onions right out of 
hand, as one would an apple. 
On the way up from Red Eagle Lake a fault 
in the bed of the gorge had made a small water¬ 
fall and pool. I never went anywhere in that 
country without my fly-rod, but here the water 
was so close to the glacier and its lofty tumble 
that it was milky and flies were of no avail. But 
knowing there must be trout there I grubbed in 
the dirt bank, until I found a few winged ants, 
and with these in a jiffy I had three fish that 
weighed—well, it is best not to say. I know 
their weight because it was taken on the spot, 
with a pocket scale that I am never without, in 
the mountains. Those who have fished virgin 
water in Montana or Wyoming can supply their 
own figures. 
Notwithstanding all the medicine smoke that 
Jim devoutly lifted to the storm deity-—Old Man, 
as Jim called him—it poured dismally and heavily 
for two nights and a day. We were wet as 
drowned rats, but there were evidently no bac¬ 
teria within ten miles of us, and we caught no 
cold. The wind drops down these chasms at 
times with a terrific pace, and the weirdest sounds 
I have ever known in nature I heard those nights. 
The gale, wrestling with the beetling crags and 
twisting and soughing through the tops of the 
spruces, actually made a sound like the rise and 
fall of a chant in some cathedral, faint and thin 
from distance. 
Bear sign were all about the camp, but they 
are shy brutes, and as our horses and Frank’s 
little cocker spaniel made no disturbance, we 
thought nothing of the indications, and waited 
patiently for the downpour to let up, which it 
did during the second night. The sun rose bright 
and clear, and with its first beams Jim and I 
were on the, move, bound for the haunts and 
fastnesses of William Goat. Frank, who had no 
gun, stayed in camp to shift the horses from 
patch to patch of the swamp grass. 
We waded in the creek bed for a few hundred 
yards, dodging the tag alder, and the marshy 
ground which were far wetter than the creek, but 
on leaving the stream we were at once wet to 
the roots of our hair from the water that clung 
to the dense underbrush. 
William had as usual chosen his retreat with 
considerable circumspection. In the summer the 
nannies, with their kids, are often found low 
down, where it is no great trouble to get at 
them. But the billies herd by themselves, choos¬ 
ing spots in which they have reason to believe 
no living creature can disturb them. This is 
always near a glacier, where there are water and 
green grass. The physical conformation of their 
“roost” is nearly always the same—a ledge on 
the face of a cliff, not far from its top, with a 
sheer precipice hundreds of feet high in front 
and a wall just as steep, but only a few score 
yards in height behind. To hunt goats success¬ 
fully it is usually necessary to get above them. 
In this case the V-shaped cliff that blocked 
the end of the canon was perhaps 1,000 or 1,200 
feet high, and on a narrow perch near the top 
of it vegetated William and his friends. How 
we mounted I scarcely know; it was a weary 
climb. Above the “shell rock” our mode was: 
I would take the guns, while Jim would work 
his way up the face of the wall a few feet, test¬ 
ing every projection before he put his weight 
on it, for a slip meant death to us both. Then 
I would hand him up the guns, and he would 
stop and wait until I could work up to him and 
take the guns again, when the process would be 
repeated. Time and again we were ready to 
quit, Jim protesting there was no thoroughfare, 
but we finally made it. 
On top we almost at once discovered that Wil¬ 
liam and his friends were at home. The little 
grassy ledge on which they lay was near the 
point of the V, about a hundred yards down, to 
one side of the route we had taken. Goats in 
