billowed, white drifts that seem to
heave and fall to the motions of the runner, mounting and coasting and
skimming over the unbroken waste like a bird winging the ocean. And
against this endless stretch of drifts billowing away to a boundless
circle, of which the man is the centre, his form is dwarfed out of all
proportion, till he looks no larger than a bird above the sea.

When the sun rises, strange colour effects are caused by the frost haze.
Every shrub takes fire; for the ice drops are a prism, and the result is
the same as if there had been a star shower or rainfall of brilliants.
Does the Indian trapper see all this? The white man with white man
arrogance doubts whether his tawny brother of the wilds sees the beauty
about him, because the Indian has no white man's terms of expression.
But ask the bronzed trapper the time of day; and he tells you by the
length of shadow the sun casts, or the degree of light on the snow.
Inquire the season of the year; and he knows by the slant sunlight
coming up through the frost smoke of the southern horizon. And get him
talking about his Happy Hunting-Grounds; and after he has filled it with
the implements and creatures and people of the chase, he will describe
it in the metaphor of what he has seen at sunrise and sunset and under
the Northern Lights. He does not _see_ these things with the gabbling
exclamatories of a tourist. He sees them because they sink into his
nature and become part of his mental furniture. The most brilliant
description the writer ever heard of the Hereafter was from an old Cree
squaw, toothless, wrinkled like leather, belted at the waist like a
sack of wool, with hands of dried parchment, and moccasins some five
months too odoriferous. Her version ran that Heaven would be full of the
music of running waters and south winds; that there would always be warm
gold sunlight like a midsummer afternoon, with purple shadows, where
tired women could rest; that the trees would be covered with blossoms,
and all the pebbles of the shore like dewdrops.

Pushed from the Atlantic seaboard back over the mountains, from the
mountains to the Mississippi, west to the Rockies, north to the Great
Lakes, all that was to be seen of nature in America the Indian trapper
has seen; though he has not understood.

But now he holds only a fringe of hunting-grounds, in the timber lands
of the Great Lakes, in the canons of the Rockies, and across that
northern land which converges