Pierre interrupted by coming in and John went off cursing the Company, the brigade, the country, the day he came to it. If his party deserts, this trip will fail. So another day ends.” The next day, not a soul would go to work. With the storm howling round the tepee as if it would tear the buffalo flaps away, the solitary white man sitting by the fire inside the lodge, knew the mutiny was spreading. Up and down the cañon roared the blizzard, booming down from the mountains for almost a week, the bitter North wind drifting, piling, packing in a wall of snow from end to end of the eight-mile trench that had been cleared. Watching the smoke curl up from the central fire to the tepee top, Ross though alone, could afford to smile. With that wall of snow behind, it would be just as hard to go back as to go forward. The storm was cutting off the mutineers’ retreat. That night as the fires were smoldering and the hobbled bronchos huddling about the lodge walls for shelter from the wind, a furious barking of dogs aroused camp and the shout of “enemies, enemies, Blackfeet,” brought the trappers dashing out muskets in hand. The fire inside a tepee is too good a target for attack. Outside, even in storm is safer, but the snow muffled forms emerging from the wooly darkness proved to be no enemies at all, but six friendly Nez Percés, who had come from the buffalo hunt across the mountains on snowshoes. Five days the journey had taken. They reported buffalo in plenty but the snow deeper farther down the cañon. Taking advantage of the diversion created, Ross sent for John, the mutineer, and offered to reduce his debt to the Company “if the intriguing scamp would hunt the hills for game to keep the camp in meat.” John disposed of, Ross called for thirty volunteers to go back over the mountain on snowshoes with the Nez Percés to the buffalo hunt. With thirty men across the mountains, there was no danger of the rest turning back. Storm was followed by thaw, that increased the pasturage for the horses, and sent the Indian women picking cranberries in the marshes, and set the snow-slides rumbling down the mountains like thunder. Birds were singing in the cañon, geese winging north overhead, but still the snow lay packed like a wedge in the pass, barring way for horses or cannon. “I feel anxious, very anxious at our long delay here,” writes Ross at the end of a month. “The people grumble much. That sly, deep dog of an Iroquois, Laurent, deserted camp to-day before I knew. A more headstrong, ill-designing set of rascals than form this camp, God never permitted together in the fur trade.” In a few weeks the buffalo hunters were back with store of meat, which the squaws began to pound into pemmican; but the sun glare had been so strong on the unsheltered slopes of the uplands that six of the hunters were led home snow-blind. This discouraged the freemen, fickle as children; and rebellion began to brew again. In vain, Ross called a council, and went from lodge to