Yet wild as they were, these mountains were thickly peopled.  As I climbed farther, I found the broad dusty paths made by the elk, as they filed across the mountainside.  The grass on all the terraces was trampled down by deer; there were numerous tracks of wolves, and in some of the rougher and more precipitous parts of the ascent, I found foot-prints different from any that I had ever seen, and which I took to be those of the Rocky Mountain sheep.  I sat down upon a rock; there was a perfect stillness.  No wind was stirring, and not even an insect could be heard.  I recollected the danger of becoming lost in such a place, and therefore I fixed my eye upon one of the tallest pinnacles of the opposite mountain.  It rose sheer upright from the woods below, and by an extraordinary freak of nature sustained aloft on its very summit a large loose rock.  Such a landmark could never be mistaken, and feeling once more secure, I began again to move forward.  A white wolf jumped up from among some bushes, and leaped clumsily away; but he stopped for a moment, and turned back his keen eye and his grim bristling muzzle.  I longed to take his scalp and carry it back with me, as an appropriate trophy of the Black Hills, but before I could fire, he was gone among the rocks.  Soon I heard a rustling sound, with a cracking of twigs at a little distance, and saw moving above the tall bushes the branching antlers of an elk.  I was in the midst of a hunter’s paradise.

Such are the Black Hills, as I found them in July; but they wear a different garb when winter sets in, when the broad boughs of the fir tree are bent to the ground by the load of snow, and the dark mountains are whitened with it.  At that season the mountain-trappers, returned from their autumn expeditions, often build their rude cabins in the midst of these solitudes, and live in abundance and luxury on the game that harbors there.  I have heard them relate, how with their tawny mistresses, and perhaps a few young Indian companions, they have spent months in total seclusion.  They would dig pitfalls, and set traps for the white wolves, the sables, and the martens, and though through the whole night the awful chorus of the wolves would resound from the frozen mountains around them, yet within their massive walls of logs they would lie in careless ease and comfort before the blazing fire, and in the morning shoot the elk and the deer from their very door.

CHAPTER XVIII

A MOUNTAIN HUNT

The camp was full of the newly-cut lodge-poles; some, already prepared, were stacked together, white and glistening, to dry and harden in the sun; others were lying on the ground, and the squaws, the boys, and even some of the warriors were busily at work peeling off the bark and paring them with their knives to the proper dimensions.  Most of the hides obtained at the last camp were dressed and scraped thin enough for use, and many of the squaws were engaged in fitting