"The old men say that a long time ago, in the time of our grandfathers, or great-grandfathers, or even back before that, the Blackfeet people used to live out in the timber country away east of the Rocky Mountains. In that land they were at war with people, who fought with them and troubled them. Game was hard to get, for their only weapons were arrows pointed with bits of stone and with these weapons it was hard for them to kill food. They had never been a people that ate fish, but believed that all animals and all birds were fit for food and could be eaten. "John said that the attacks of their enemies and the difficulty of getting food were the things that made them move from that lower country up closer to the mountains. He says that when he was a little boy, and afterward when he was larger, he used to hear in the lodge the talks between his mother and an old Blood Indian named Su' ta ne. This old man may have been some sort of relation to John, but about that I don't know. At all events, Su' ta ne was then very old, and the time he used to talk about was when he was a little boy. Su' ta ne had heard his father speak of the trouble that they used to have down in the timber country, and said that it was in his father's boyhood that they began to move westward, traveling up the Saskatchewan or some of the rivers that flow into it. Su' ta ne said that it was when he was a little boy that they first saw the Rocky Mountains; this, according to John, must have been a long time ago. John must be now sixty or sixty-five years old, and he said that Su' ta ne was very old when he used to hear him talk about this. If we say that John heard it fifty years ago and that Su' ta ne was born when his father was thirty, it carries the beginning of the movement back a hundred and thirty or a hundred and forty years, which, according to my guess, would be about 1745 or 50, and I reckon that was a long time before any white man got into the country where those people used to live. Maybe, though, it was a good deal longer ago than that. I guess all John meant was that it was long, long ago, and when Su' ta ne said that it was in his father's time that they began to move toward the mountains, he may have meant only that this move was before he knew anything." "I guess you're right there, Jack," said Hugh. "Indians are mighty weak on dates, after they get back farther than they themselves can remember." "Yes," went on Mason, "I don't believe it's any use to try to fix a date. It's bound to be guesswork. Anyhow, old John said that Su' ta ne, when he described the country that they lived in, said it was mostly timbered, with stretches of prairie among the timber--something like big parks, I reckon.