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JUNE 30, 1906.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
1025 
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stone that winter, which they sold for about two 
dollars each to eastern tannery buyers. We got 
twenty-seven hundred robes, about a thousand 
deer, antelope and elk skins, and the rest of the 
traders along the river, all told, had about as 
many more. Most of the robes we got Were 
killed in the early part of the winter. As the 
season advanced the hunters had to ride further 
and further to find the game. There was no 
doubt but what the end of the trade was 
near. 
In February we ran short of trade blankets, 
and I went to a trading post up at the mouth of 
the Judith after more, taking Nat-ah’-ki with me. 
The river was solidly frozen, so we took that 
route, each driving a pony hitched to a Red River 
meat enough to eat. 
sled. It was pleasant, traveling up the familiar 
river over the smooth ice. The weather was not 
too cold, and it neither blew nor snowed. We 
traveled the first day to the foot of the Dauphin 
Rapids, and camped in the cabin of some wood 
hawks, temporarily absent. They had left the 
latch string out and a notice on the rude table 
which read: “Make yerself to hum, stranger, an’ 
shet the door when you leeve.” 
We did make ourselves “to hum.” Nat-ah’-ki 
cooked a. good meal in the hearth, and then we 
sat long before the pleasant fire in the most com- 
fortable of chairs. They were merely green 
buffalo hides stretched over a pole frame work, 
but they had been used as the skins dried, and 
fitted perfectly; every part of the body had just 
the proper support. 
The next day we reached our. destination, and 
on the following one started homeward with our 
loads of blankets. It was about four in the 
afternoon that we saw some buffalo scurrying 
southward across the river, and heard some firing 
back in the breaks. A little later we saw a large 
camp of Indians file down into a bottom below us. 
I was not a little uneasy at first, for I feared 
that they might be Assinaboines, and they had 
recently killed a woodhawk, and committed other 
depredations along the river. I stopped my horse 
and asked Nat-ah’-ki what we had best do, drive 
on as rapidly as possible, or stop and camp with 
them. She gazed at them intently for a moment; 
they were already pitching fheir lodges,-and a 
painted lodge skin was just then elevated and 
spread around the poles. “Oh!” she cried, with 
a happy catch of the breath which was almost a 
‘sob, “Oh, they are our people. See! that is the 
buffalo medicine lodge they have put up. Hurry! 
let us go over to them.” 
_ They were indeed some of the Piegans under 
Red Bird’s Tail, with whom we camped that 
night. They were as pleased to meet us as we 
‘were them, and it was far into the night when 
-we reluctantly went to bed, the supply of lodge 
fuel having given out. “We are near the end of 
it,” Red Bird’s Tail said tome. “We have hunted 
‘far this winter, along Milk River, in the Wolf 
Mountains (Little Rockies), and now over here 
on the Big River, and we have just about had 
Friend, I fear that this is 
our last buffalo hunt.” 
I told him of the conditions south and east of 
us, that there were no buffalo anywhere, except’ 
the few bctween us and the Yellowstone, and 
even there no herds of more than a hundred or so. 
“Are you sure,” he said; “sure that the white 
men have seen all the land which they say lies 
between the two salt waters? Haven't they over- 
looked some big part of the country where our 
‘out of the water.” 
buffalo have congregated and from whence they 
may return?” 
“There is no place in the whole land,” I re- 
plied, ‘‘north, south, east or west, that the white 
men have not traveled, are not traveling right 
now, and none of them can find buffalo. Do not 
believe, as many of your people do, that they 
_have driven them away in order to deprive you of 
your living. White men are just as anxious to 
kill buffalo for their hides and meat as you are.” 
“Then, that being the case,” he said with a deep 
sigh, “misery and death are at hand for me and 
mine. We are going to starve.” 
On our way homeward the next morning, I saw 
a lone buffalo calf—almost a yearling then—stand- 
ing dejectedly, forlornly, in a clump of rye grass 
near the river. I killed it, and took off the hide, 
horns, hoofs and all. The Crow Woman tanned 
it for me later and decorated the flesh side with 
gaudy porcupine quill work. That was my last 
buffalo. Along in the afternoon we startled 
something like seventy-five head which had come 
to the frozen stream in search of water. They 
scampered wildly across the bottom and up the 
slope of the valley to the plains. That was the 
last herd of them that Nat-ah’-ki and I ever 
saw. 
The little woman fad I had been homesick for 
some time. While we loved the great river, its 
lovely valley and fantastic bad lands, we did not 
like the people temporarily there. We were ever 
talking and dreaming of our home on the Marias, 
and so one May morning, we embarked on the 
first boat of the season for Fort Benton, and 
thence to Fort Conrad. And thus we bade good- 
by forever to the old plains life and the buffalo 
and the Indian trade. 
Berry soon followed us, leaving a man in charge 
of our place, which we ran—at a loss—for an- 
other year, getting only three hundred, mostly 
bull robes, the last winter, 1882-3. 
WALTER B. ANDERSON. 
[TO BE CONTINUED. | 
The Twilight Limited. 
“Att aboard Northwestern Line, Twilight 
Limited for Lake Elmo, Stillwater, Hudson, 
Deer Park, Clear Lake, Cumberland, Shell Lake, 
Spooner, Silver Lake, Superior, West Superior 
and Duluth, first track to the right.” That is 
our train, and out we go with the crush and 
jam, and it seems as if there would be a terrible 
jam, for the entire crowd at the St. Paul Union 
depot seems bent on going out on that one 
train. They are soon distributed, however, 
throughout the long train and there proves to 
be ample room for all. The bell rings and the 
wheels begin to ring and chime along the polish- 
ed steel. Through smoke and grime, switch- 
yard and suburb, we are whirled away on our . 
long twilight ride. 
Though the sun is quite high when we start, 
by the time we have passed Stillwater and left 
the smoke of the cities behind, it is nearing the 
rim of the horizon and soon drops below the 
level of the wooded hills. In a car of long dis- 
tance passengers, they will often sit silent 
throughout a long, hard day, but when twilight 
comes, they will revive and begin to talk; they 
are not less disposed to talk when starting out 
at twilight; and there was a grand Babel of 
voices out of which we got something like the 
following: | “Twenty-nine two-pound bass in 
an hour out of that little lake.” “Two big bucks 
in one afternoon only a mile back of the 
station.” “Weighed forty-one pounds; an hour 
“Beautiful lake on the right 
there, that’s where Tom Small made his famous 
record.” “Two hundred and fifty § pounds 
dressed.” “Spit out the hook after I had him in 
the landing net; well, if that wasn’t luck!” 
4 
We are now in a land of green wooded hills 
dotted and freckled with silver lakes between, 
and though we are not on a fishing excursion 
and most of the passengers are on ordinary 
business bent, such scenery will cause the man 
who never fishes to talk of fish and fishing and 
his eyes will bulge and sparkle like those of the 
small boy looking over the circus tent from the 
top of an adjacent box car. At a small way 
station, a young man got aboard with rod, reel 
and basket containing a dozen fine bass. We 
had turned the seats the better to converse, and 
the seats being mostly filled, we made room for 
the fisherman and his basket of fish; indeed, 
they were good to look upon. As soon as he 
was seated, the angler unlimbered his linguis- 
tic machinery, and began to tell us how this 
bass struck, and how that big fellow took out 
all his. line and left him with an empty reel with 
the fish still going; how a cool head and steady 
hand turned almost certain defeat into victory; 
together with a lot more of the stuff anglers 
have reeled up ready for willing listeners. We 
closed our outward eye looking wise, as much 
as to say we understand, as indeed we do un- 
derstand, far too weil to believe a fish story. 
That fellow had gone out into the woods and 
whittled those fish out of a basswood log. He 
could not have got them any other way, as there 
was no fish market where he got on nor yet 
any small boys loafin’ round. 
A ruffed grouse rising near the track and dart- 
ing away into the shadow, gavé the bird hunter 
just behind his inning. It was a lone cock, be- 
ing the nesting season, but enough to start the 
flow of memory, and the nimrod began: “Those 
wooded hills there afford great ruffed grouse 
shooting in the ‘season, that half timbers, half 
open country is the ideal place for that kind 
of thing, and the grouse are there too. Any 
one who is not afraid of a little recreation, can 
get a pair of an afternoon if he tries, that is, 
if he can shoot at all. I do the trick every sea- 
son and sometimes two or three times. 
A pair! That reminds me that several years 
ago, I came over this same route in November, 
and saw every station platform piled with deer 
and grouse. Then they talked of grouse in 
three numbers, and of deer in at least two. Now 
a pair of grouse is a proud boast, and the ques- 
tion is, “Did you get your deer?” Not how 
many deer. did you get! This reminds us in 
turn that as the farmer and ranchman crowded 
the buffalo from the western plains, so are far- 
mer and dairyman crowding the deer from the 
forest; the wildfowl from the marshes. To 
make room for more, the ax and the dredge 
are crowding the wild things in nature through 
ever narrowing limits to extinction. When 
will the rebuilding process be begun with equal 
energy? When will reforesting and irrigation 
be begun in a commen sense way? When shall 
we see each swale, ravine and gulch turned 
into reservoirs throughout hill and mountain 
country, holding in check and controlling floods 
and increasing rainfall alike and opening the 
way to reforesting besides. The amount ex- 
pended in destruction during the Spanish War 
would advance the work to that extent, that 
all would understand how practical and simple 
it was. That would insure the finish. 
But why expect humankind to understand 
such a subject by a less process than the slow 
growth of a thousand years? Truly, we don’t 
understand much. We bewail*the loss of the 
buffalo we have killed and want them back that 
we may continue to kill, never stopping to re- 
flect that if they were restored in their greatest 
numbers to-day, there are enough people on the 
old ranges to kill them off again at one volley. 
The man returning empty-handed from the Wis- 
consin woods (a thing not at all necessary in 
this day and age) gnashes his teeth in rage at 
wanton destruction of game—his game—never 
stopping to reflect that ten times the animal 
life is maintained on the same territory now, 
that was maintained there in its primeval state. 
The millions who have benefited by the dis- 
placement of the game are not going to lie down 
and die because we are displeased. Preserve, 
reserve, restock and rebuild is the only re- 
course. 
But what. great flare of lights is that show- 
