Jack In The Box

With noisy puffings the steamboat was slowly pushing her way up the river. On either side the flat bottom, in some places overgrown with high willow brush, in others, bearing a growth of tall and sturdy cottonwoods, ran back a long way to the yellow bluffs beyond. The bluffs were rounded and several hundred feet in height, rising imperceptibly until they seemed to meet the blue of the sky, so that the boat appeared to be moving at the bottom of a wide trough.

Hour after hour she pushed on, meeting nothing, seeing nothing alive, except now and then a pair of great gray geese, followed by their yellow goslings; or sometimes on the shore a half-concealed red object, which moved quickly out of sight, and which observers knew to be a deer.

On the boat were two of our old friends. From the far East had come Jack Danvers, traveling day after day until he had reached Bismarck, Dakota, where he found awaiting him Hugh Johnson, as grave, as white-haired, and as cheery as ever. At Bismarck they had taken the up-river steamer, "Josephine," and the boat had sailed early on the morning of July 5th.

Hugh and Jack were on their way back up to the Piegan country. They had separated at Bismarck the previous autumn, and while Hugh kept on down the river, to take a west-bound train, which should carry him back to Mr. Sturgis' ranch in Wyoming, Jack had gone East, to spend the winter in New York. He had had a year of hard work at school, for his experience of the previous winter had taught him that it paid well to work in school, and to make the most of his opportunities there. This made his parents more willing to have him go away to this healthful life, and he found that if he did his best he enjoyed all the better the wild, free life of the prairie and the mountains, which he now hoped would be his during a part, at least, of every year.

His summer with the Piegans had taught him many things known to few boys in the East, and given him many pleasures to which they are strangers; and the more he saw of this prairie life the more he enjoyed it, and the more he hoped to have more and more of it. Sometimes, when he awoke early in the morning, or at night, after he had gone to bed, as he lay between sleeping and waking, he used to go over in his mind the scenes that he had visited, and the stirring adventures in which he had taken part, and these memories, with the hope of others like them, gave him a pleasure that he would not have parted with for anything.

Often when he was in New York, walking through narrow city streets, looking up at high buildings, hearing the roar and rattle of the passing traffic, and watching the people hurry to and fro, each one absorbed in his own business, it was hard to realize that away off somewhere, only a few days' journey distant, there was a land where there was no limit to the view, where each human being seemed absolutely free, and where it was possible to travel for days and days without seeing a single person. Always interwoven with his dreams and his imaginings about this distant country was the memory of the friend Hugh, to whom he was so deeply attached. It hardly seemed to him possible to go anywhere in the West, except in company with Hugh, and until he had joined him, it never seemed as if his journey had begun, or was really going to be made.

All through the day the boat went on, turning and twisting, and at different times facing all points of the compass. Sometimes the sun would be shining on the port side of the boat, a little later on the starboard side, then it would be ahead, and again behind. Hugh and Jack spent their time chatting on the upper deck of the boat, Hugh smoking vigorously, to keep off the mosquitoes, while Jack, the edges of his handkerchief under his hat and tucked inside his coat collar, to leeward of Hugh, took advantage of the constant stream of smoke that poured from his pipe. They had much to tell each other of the winter that had passed, and much to say of the trip on which they were now starting. Fort Benton was their destination, and until they reached there, and saw their friend Joe, the Blackfoot Indian who was to meet them with the horses, they were uncertain what they should do.

There were not a few passengers on the boat. Some of them were carefully dressed persons, wearing long frock coats, white shirts, and a modest amount of jewelry, residents of the thriving towns of Helena or Virginia City, Montana; others were army officers, on their way to posts in the Northwest, or now starting out on some exploring expedition; while others still were persons of whose occupation and destination it was hard to judge from their appearance.

Among them was a middle-aged man who Jack thought, from his conversation, had long been a resident of the plains, and who told Jack something about a trade that he had long practised-that of wolfing.

"Why, young fellow," he said, "it is only a few years ago since there was good money in wolfin', but I had to quit it down in the southern country for wolves got too scarce when the buffalo got killed off. Wherever there was buffalo there was plenty of wolves, for the wolves made their livin' off the herds, just like the Indians; and when I say wolves I mean big wolves, coyotes, foxes, and swifts.

"In the autumn, as soon as the fur began to get good, I used to start out and find a herd of buffalo, and after shootin' two or three of them, I'd skin them down, and rip them up, and put from one to three bottles of strychnine in each carcass. After the blood that lay in the ribs had been poisoned good, I'd smear that over the meat on the outside. Generally I'd try to kill my buffalo close to where I was goin' to camp, and after I had put out my baits I went to camp and slept until near day. Then, before I could see, I'd get up, cook my breakfast, hitch up, if I had a team, and go round to all my baits. Likely, around each one I'd find my half dozen to fifteen wolves, and sometimes it would take me two or three days to skin them. Likely enough, if the weather turned right cold, I got a good many more wolves than I could skin, and had to stack them up, and wait till I got time. It was mighty hard work now, and don't you forget it. Then, too, there was always a chance that Indians might come along and make trouble for me. You take a man out on the prairie, ten years ago, and even the friendly Indians were likely to scare him a whole lot, or take his hides, even if they didn't take away his gun and his horses. As for the hostiles, if they got too close to a man it was all up with him. But I never had no trouble with them, except once, and then I was camped in the dug-out, with plenty of provisions, and there was only three of the Indians. I saw them comin', and suspected who they were, and managed to get my horses into the dug-out with me and stood 'em off. They scared me bad though.

"I should think so," said Jack.

The man stopped talking to fill his pipe and after he had lighted it puffed thoughtfully. Then he continued: "There's another way I've wolfed it, and that is by draggin' a bait over quite a scope of country, and droppin' pieces of poisoned meat along the trail. I used to do that when I couldn't find animals to kill for bait. This worked pretty well for awhile but it's no good any more down in that country."

"I've seen coyotes killed by putting poisoned tallow in auger holes, bored in chunks of wood," said Jack.

"Yes," said the man, "that's good sometimes, and they stay there lickin' and lickin' up the bait until they die right there. You don't have to look over much country to find your wolves."

"What kind of meat did you use when you were dragging the bait?" asked Jack.

"Most any kind would do," replied the wolfer; "sometimes it would be a piece of buffalo meat, sometimes a shoulder of a deer, but the best bait of all is a beaver carcass; there's lots of grease and lots of smell to that, and the wolves and coyotes are sure to follow it. This draggin' a trail is good too, because the wolves, when they go along and snap up the poisoned bait, don't go off, but keep right on followin' the trail, and you find them there, maybe quite a long way from where they pick the bait.

"Where are you goin', young fellow; you and that old man I see you talking with?"

"We're going up to Benton," said Jack, "and I don't know where we're going from there. I expect we'll meet a friend there, with our horses, and then we're going to make a trip, off maybe on the prairies, and maybe into the mountains; we can't tell yet."

"Sho," said the man, "you're sure goin' to have a good time. I've got to get a job when I get to Benton; somethin' that'll keep me until it comes time for fur to get good."

The next morning when Jack and Hugh left their stateroom a heavy fog hung low over the river and the boat was not moving, but was tied up to the bank, for it was so thick that there was danger of running aground on the frequent sand-bars, and as the river was now falling, the captain was unwilling to take the chance of such delay. On the lower deck was a dug-out canoe, the property of a temporary passenger, who was going only to Fort Berthold, and, after breakfast, Jack suggested to Hugh that they should borrow this canoe and go off a little way up the river, taking their guns, and seeing whether they could kill anything. Hugh said this could not be done, explaining that it would be easy enough to get lost, which would be bad for them, and very irritating to the captain, who might feel it necessary to wait for them; and besides this, the fog might lift at any moment, when the boat would move onward much faster than they could paddle. As it happened, the fog lifted almost immediately, and the boat set forward; and a little before noon the village of the Rees, Gros Ventres and Mandans, high up on the bluff above the river, was seen; and soon after the boat tied up, and all hands went ashore.

The bluff rose steeply from the river, and up and down its face were steep trails, worn by the feet of women passing up and down as they carried water and the driftwood which they gathered, up to the village. On the top of the bluff stood the bee-hive shaped gray houses, which Hugh told Jack were much like those occupied by the Pawnees.

They began to climb the bluff toward the village, and Jack asked Hugh about the Indians who lived here.

"In old times," said Hugh, "these Indians were scattered out up and down the river. The Gros Ventres lived furthest up, between here and Buford, and the Rees and Mandans lived further down the stream. A long time ago,-back maybe more than a hundred years,-the Rees and the Mandans all lived together, away down below here; but then they had some sort of a quarrel among themselves, and the Mandans moved on up the stream, and for a long time camped near the mouth of the Knife River. For a while after that there was some fighting between the Rees and Mandans, but after a time they made peace, and gradually the tribes came together again; and now for a long time they've all lived together in this village of Berthold. In old times each of these villages was a big one, but since the white men came among them, and brought smallpox, and liquor, and all the other things that the white men bring, they are dying off fast, and I don't believe that now there is more than eight or nine hundred of these Indians all together. You know these Rees here are kind of kin to the Pawnees; they speak near the same language, so that I can talk with 'em, and they call the Pawnees their relations. I think they used to be a part of the Skidi band. Nobody knows just when they separated from the Pawnees, but it must have been a good while ago."

Hugh paused, and Jack asked: "Does any one know how they came to separate, Hugh? Is there any tradition about it?"