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For over a hundred yards he goes, until both up- and down-stream he can almost see the faint fires of the Indians in the timber. Farther out he can hear hoof-beats and voices, so he edges along westward until he comes suddenly to a depression, a little winding "cooley" across the prairie, through which in the early spring the snows are carried off from some ravine among the bluffs.
Four days were spent about this rock, the beasts nearly perishing through hunger: for the summits of the mountains are for the most part bare, and if there is any pasture the snows bury it. The lower parts contain valleys, and some sunny hills, and rivulets flowing beside woods, and scenes more worthy of the abode of man.
In the late snows, word came that Cummins was to take Williams' place as factor, and Per-ee at once set off for the Fond du Lac to bring back Jean de Gravois as "chief man." Croisset gave up his fox-hunting to fill Mukee's place. The changes brought new happiness to Melisse.
When it was full we laughed and sang and feasted as no king feasts, because no king has such spice of appetite nor can snap his fingers at the world and care as we could: when it was empty, and it was mostly empty, we laughed and sang the louder and shared our crusts or went gaily hungry. Brave lads every one, and brave days. Aye, aye." "And where are they now?" "With the snows of yester year!
The snows fill the ravines in drifts one hundred feet in depth, and such are the rigors of winter that the women who live in the fur-trading posts on that section of our northern border, are often carried across the mountains into Oregon or Washington territory, to shield them from the severities of the inclement season.
When the snows of another winter whitened the plains of Europe, the armies again retired to winter quarters, the Austrian party having made very decided progress as the result of the campaign. Marlborough was in possession of most of the Netherlands, and was threatening France with invasion.
Off to the westward, where the ranges thrust gaunt, gray peaks against the sky line, the light shimmered against patches of white, the remnants of the last winter's snows. Far away, just to be discerned through a notch in the first range, was a vivid point of emerald or jade, the living green of a glacier.
Miles and miles and days and days they climbed, with Shasta ever developing new forms and phases in her summer snows. "A moving picture in the sky," said Billy at last. "Oh, it is all so beautiful," sighed Saxon. "But there are no moon-valleys here."
The party camped and built the boats they needed, and a fortnight later they were poling up-stream to the lake we to-day know as Windermere, where Thompson built a fort which he called 'Kootenai. Here he spent the winter trading, and when the warm Chinook winds cleared away the snows, in April 1808, about the time Fraser was preparing to descend the Fraser river, he paddled up-stream to where the Columbia river has its source in Upper Columbia Lake.
In due time a son was born to them, the idol of his mother's heart, and the constant companion of the father, who seemed to find in the child some link with his own stray wits; but when the boy was about three years old the poor exile was seized with a fever, and in his delirium escaping from his tender nurse stalked naked through the village proclaiming in the native tongue that the wrath of God hung over this people and this land, because of the cruel wrong they had done to him and to his comrades; and he foretold that before seven snows had covered his grave, white men from over the sea should come like the wildfowl in the spring and settle down upon the creeks and ponds, and fill the forest with their cry, and the red men should melt away as the snow melts and their place be no more seen.
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