One useful purpose that this book may serve is to give professional hunters and trappers their due as hard working men. From time immemorial it has been the fashion to look down upon their ilk as lazy vagabonds "too trifling to work for a living." Such is the almost universal opinion of people who never have taken a big game hunt themselves, never even have seen hunters at work in the wilderness, but know them only as they take their well-earned ease after an exhausting chase. "The lazy hunter" is the most misjudged of men; for really there is no harder labor than the pursuit of wild animals for a livelihood. The libelous epithet perhaps came in vogue from the fact that hunting and trapping are apt to unfit a man for _settled_ habits of industry. Or it may have come from observing the whole-souled enjoyment with which the hunter pursues his occupation. We have not yet got rid of the Puritan notion that no effort is worthy unless it is painful to the spirit. The freeman of the woods calls his labor sport, and he laughs, in retrospect, at all the cruel toil, the starving and freezing and broken bones. Being utterly independent he seldom does things that "go against the grain," save as he is driven by necessity. But how sharp was the lash of that necessity, how often it stung body and soul, how many a hunter "went under," even in the old days when game was in the greatest abundance, is shown with perfect fidelity to truth in this picture of "Life in the Far West." Horace Kephart. IN THE OLD WEST CHAPTER I |AWAY to the head-waters of the Platte, where several small streams run into the south fork of that river, and head in the broken ridges of the "Divide" which separates the valleys of the Platte and the Arkansa, were camped a band of trappers on a creek called Bijou. It was the month of October, when the early frosts of the coming winter had crisped and dyed with sober brown the leaves of the cherry and quaking ash belting the brooks; and the ridges and peaks of the Rocky Mountains were already covered with a glittering mantle of snow, sparkling in the still powerful rays of the autumn sun.