e windings of a river to be
carried to his hunting-ground. Here, streams were too turbulent for
canoes; and boats were abandoned for horses; and mountain canons with
sides sheer as a wall drove the trapper back from the river-bed to
interminable forests, where windfall and underbrush and rockslide
obstructed every foot of progress. The valley might be shut in by a
blind wall which cooped the hunter up where was neither game nor food.
Out of this valley, then, he must find a way for himself and his horses,
noting every peak so that he might know this region again, noting
especially the peaks with the black rock walls; for where the rock is
black snow has not clung, and the mountain face will not change; and
where snow cannot stick, a man cannot climb; and the peak is a good one
for the trapper to shun.

One, two, three seasons have often slipped away before the mountaineers
found good hunting-ground. Ten years is a short enough time to learn the
lie of the land in even a small section of mountains. It was twenty
years from the time Lewis and Clark first crossed the mountains before
the traders of St. Louis could be sure that the trappers sent into the
Rockies would find their way out. Seventy lives were lost in the first
two years of mountain trapping, some at the hands of the hostile
Blackfeet guarding the entrance to the mountains at the head waters of
the Missouri, some at the hands of the Snakes on the Upper Columbia,
others between the Platte and Salt Lake. Time and money and life it cost
to learn the hunting-grounds of the Rockies; and the mountaineers would
not see knowledge won at such a cost wrested away by a spying rival.

* * * * *

Then, too, the mountains had bred a new type of trapper, a new style of
trapping.

Only the most daring hunters would sign contracts for the "Up-Country,"
or _Pays d'en Haut_ as the French called it. The French trappers, for
the most part, kept to the river valleys and plains; and if one went to
the mountains for a term of years, when he came out he was no longer the
smug, indolent, laughing, chattering _voyageur_. The great silences of a
life hard as the iron age had worked a change. To begin with, the man
had become a horseman, a climber, a scout, a fighter of Indians and
elements, lank and thin and lithe, silent and dogged and relentless.

In other regions hunters could go out safely in pairs or even alone,
carrying supplies enough for the sea