

FOREST AND STREAM. 



















il 
In the Lodges of the Blackfeet. 
XXVIII.—Nat-ah-ki’s Ride. 
WEEK after week the Piegans waited for the 
buffalo to reappear on the plains of their reser- 
vation. With the hot weather they thought that 
some of the herds to the eastward would stray 
up to the cooler altitude, and they still believed 
that somewhere in the unknown fastnesses of the 
Rockies hordes of the animals had been cached, 
and that in some way they would be able to re- 
turn to the open country. In the meantime the 
hunters scoured the foothills in quest of deer and 
elk and antelope, finding some, it is true, but 
barely enough to keep their families from actual 
starvation. 


In our ranching work we were no more suc- 
cessful than the hunters in the chase. There were 
no rains, with the result that the Dry Fork re- 
mained dry, and our irrigating ditch was useless. 
Also, the thoroughbred Berkshires we procured 
from the States brought with them, or contracted 
en route some disease, and all died except the 
boar. He finally succumbed, after feasting upon 
the months-old carcass of a strychnined wolf. 
All this was very annoying to Berry, but I must 
confess that I did not feel very badly about it. 
T was never cut out for a tiller of the soil, and I 
hoped that this experience would prove to him 
that he was not, either. We had a few cattle. 
They roamed the bottoms and the nearby hills, 
waxed fat on the short gramma grass and in- 
creased. Who would plow, and sow, and reap, 
if it rained, in preference to sitting in the shade 
and watching a bunch of cattle grow? Not I. 
We did sit in the shade, the women and I. 
True, there was cooking to be done, but it was 
a matter of a few moments to boil some meat, 
bake a pan of biscuit, and heat the contents of a 
couple of tins. We did not go in for those things 
which require hours of preparation, and make 
women red in the face from heat and loss of 
temper. Washing? We wore soft things and 
none too many of them, There wasn’t an ounce 
of starch in the land, thank heaven! Long bull 
trains trecked down into the bottom, and I sold 
the dust-powdered bull-whackers beer, and 
buckskins, and tobacco. I bought deer and an- 
telope skins from the Indians, but mostly I sat 
in the shade. 
In June the river was bank full from the melt- 
ing snow of the Rockies, and our cable ferry was 
used by all travelers. One day I had to cross a 
bull train, and for the first trip seven yokes of 
bulls were driven on board, all the yokes at- 
tached to the long lead chain with which they 
pulled the wagons. I took the wheel, the ropes 
were cast off, and we left the shore, the bull- 
whacker of the team standing beside me. He 
was a French creole, a voluble, excitable, nervous 
SPOIRISISUAN 


IN] 
man, as are most of his kind. When midway in 
the stream, where the water was deepest and 
swiftest, the lead yoke of bulls backed into the 
next one, they into the one behind them, and so 
on until they were all huddled to the rear of the 
boat, and their great weight threw the bow and 
upper side of the craft clear above the surface of 
the stream. Water poured into the hold through 
the submerged deck, and the increasing weight of 
it tilted the bow higher and higher until the bulls 
could no longer retain their footing and they be- 
gan to slide off. 
“Oh, mon Dieu,” the bull-whacker cried, “it is 
that they will drown; that they will in the chains 
entangle. Return, m’sieur, return to the shore.”’ 
But IT could do nothing, the boat would neither 
go on nor back, and kept settling deeper in the 
water, which gurgled ominously under us. The 
bulls finally slid off en masse, and how they did 
rol] and snort and paw, often entirely submerged, 
but, strange to say, they drifted down to a bar 
and waded safely out in spite of the dangerous 
chain to which their yokes were attached. Freed 
from their weight the ferry surged the other 
way, dived into the stream as it were, and the 
strong current bore it down. 
“Oh, mon Dieu! Oh sacré!”’ the Frenchman 
cried. ‘Save me, m’sieur. I cannot swim.” 
And he ran toward me with outstretched arms. 
I sprang backward to avoid his threatened em- 
brace and fell, and, the water sweeping over the 
deck, carried me with it. I didn’t mind that 
much, for I knew that the current would take me 
to the bar where the bulls had landed. I looked 
back at the Frenchman. The boat was now deep 
under the water and he had perched on the cen- 
ter hog-chain post, which was itself only’a couple 
of feet above the surface. I can see him to this 
day, sitting there on top of the post, his eyes 
saucer-like with terror, the ends of his fierce 
mustache pointing to heaven, and I can still hear 
as he repeatedly crossed himself, alternately 
praying and cursing and calling on his comrades 
ashore to save him from the turbid flood. He 
was such a funny sight that I laughed so I could 
hardly keep my head above the water. 
“Hang on, Frenchy!” cried the wagon boss and 
others. “Just hang on, you'll come out all right.” 
He shook his fist at tnemy “TH Team sink Ef 
am drown, You maudit whack eet de bull,’ he 
answered, “an’ you tell me hang on. Qh, sacré! 
Oh, misére! Oh, mon Dieu!” 
I doubt not that he might have let go and sunk 
had the boat settled any deeper in the water, but 
just then the cable parted and it rose so that the 
deck was barely awash, and drifted along after 
me. Down jumped Frenchy and pirouetted around 
silei, 
on its slippery surface, and shouted and laughed 
for joy, snapped his fingers at the men who had 
jeered him, and cried: “‘Adieu, adieu, messieurs, 
me, I am bound for St. Louis, an’ my sweet- 

ee 
heart.” 
and we had no difficulty in towing it back and re- 
The boat drifted ashore not far below, 
pairing the cable. Frenchy, however, would not 
cross with his bulls, but went over with a load 
of the wagons, and he took a plank with him, to 
use as a float in case of accident. 
In the hot summer nights Nat-ah’-ki and I 
slept out on the edge of a high-cut bank near the 
river. Oh, those white moonlit perfect nights! 
They were so perfect, so peaceful, that the beauty 
and wonder of it all kept us awake long after we 
should have been sleeping soundly. An owl 
hooted. ‘“’Tis the ghost of some unfortunate 
one,’ she would say. ‘For some wrong he did, 
his shadow became an owl, and he must long 
suffer, afraid of the Sun, mournfully crying of 
nights, before he can at last join the other shad- 
ows of our people who have gone on to the Sand 
Hills.” : 
A wolf howled. “Oh, brother, why so sad? It 
seems as if they were always crying for some- 
thing that has been taken from them, or that they 
have lost. Will they ever find it, I wonder?” 
The river now moved and gurgled under the 
bank, and roared hollow down the rapid in the 
bend below. A beaver, or perchance a big fish, 
splashed its silvery surface, and she would nestle 
closer, shiver perhaps. ‘“’Tis the people of the 
deep waters,’ she would whisper. “Why, I wonder, 
was it given them to live away down in the deep,’ 
dark cold places, instead of on the land and in 
the bright sunlight? Do you think they are happy 
and warm and content as we are?” 
Such questions I answered to the best of my 
ability. “The goat loves the high, cold, bare cliffs 
of the mountains,” I said to her, “the antelope 
the warm, low, bare plains. No doubt the people 
of the river love its depths, or they would live 
on.the land as we do.” 
One night, after listening to the hooting of a 
big owl. up on the island, she said: “Just think 
how unhappy that shadow is, and even were it 
permitted to go on to the Sand Hills, still it 
would be unhappy. They are all unhappy there, 
our people who have gone from us, living their 
shadow, make-believe lives. That is why I do 
not want to die. It is so cold and cheerless 
there, and your shadow could not be with me. 
White men’s shadows cannot enter the home of 
the Blackfeet dead.” 
I said nothing, and after a little she continued: 
“Tell me, can it really be true that what the 
priests say about the next life, that the good peo- 
ple, Indian and white, will go away up in the sky 
then and live happily with World Maker forever?” 
“What could I do but encourage her. ‘What 
they say,” I replied, “is written in their ancient 
book. They believe it. Yes, they do believe it, 
and I do, toc. I am glad to believe it. Even 
the Indian may enter there; we can still be to- 
gether after this life is over.” 
