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An attempt was made to photograph the group, but the old fellow turned aside, and the old woman hobbled into the recesses of a tepee, where we heard her muttering such execrations in Cree as were possible to that innocent tongue. The hands of the woman at the cabin door were a miracle of grime and scrofula.
The track-beater's snowshoes, which were the largest used by any of the brigade, were Wood Cree "hunting shoes" and measured nearly six feet in length. The other men wore Chipewyan "tripping shoes" about three feet long the only style of Canadian snowshoes that are made in "rights and lefts."
I remember Cree best as a battered old weaver, who bent forward as he walked, with his arms hanging limp as if ready to grasp the shafts of the barrow behind which it was his life to totter uphill and downhill, a rope of yarn suspended round his shaking neck, and fastened to the shafts, assisting him to bear the yoke and slowly strangling him.
Roy did not understand, and attempted to say so as well as he could by signs, and the use of the few words of the Cree language which his father had taught him. "Ho! ho! ho!" said one and another of the Indians, while Hawk grinned horribly. A variety of questions were now put to poor Roy, who, not understanding, of course could not answer them.
One such company, composed of a dozen mounted infantrymen, accompanied by three Cree trailers, rode slowly and wearily across the brown exposed uplands down into the longer, greener grass of the wide valley bottom, until they emerged upon a barely perceptible trail which wound away in snake-like twistings, toward those high, barren hills whose blue masses were darkly silhouetted against the western sky.
As the band had no spare horses, we each of us had to mount behind a Cree; far from a pleasant position, as we had to hold on with one hand, while we carried our guns in the other, and had also our packs on our backs. Bouncer followed, keeping at a respectful distance from the heels of the horses, which showed a very unfriendly disposition to kick him when he came near.
He was thinking of that afternoon in Gaston's bedroom, when his grandson had acted, before Lady Dargan and Cluny Vosse, Sir Gaston's scene with Buckingham. "Really, most mysterious, most unaccountable. But it's one of the virtues of having a descent. When it is most needed, it counts, it counts." "Against the half-breed mother!" Lady Belward added. "Quite so, against the was it Cree or Blackfoot?
The girl appeared in the doorway, a smile on her lips and her eyes shining radiantly straight at Bram! She partly held out her arms, and began talking. She seemed utterly oblivious of Philip's presence. Not a word that she uttered could he understand. It was not Cree or Chippewyan or Eskimo. It was not French or German or any tongue that he had ever heard. Her voice was pure and soft.
At the upper end of the Reindeer they spent a week at a Cree village, and one day Roscoe stood unobserved and listened to the conversation of three young Cree women, who were weaving reed baskets. They talked so quickly that he could understand but little of what they said, but their low, soft voices were like music.
A shiver seemed to be running through him. For a moment the Missioner did not seem to hear him. Then he cried: "Give them the whip! Drive them on!" The Cree turned, unwinding his long lash. "Nipoo-win Ooyoo!" he muttered again. The whip cracked over the backs of the huskies, the end of it stinging the rump of the lead-dog, who was master of them all.
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