Far Pastures by R. M. Patterson

Author:R. M. Patterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-926971-14-8
Publisher: Touchwood Editions
Published: 2011-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

The borderland between fact and dreams was often hard for me, knowing only a few words of Stoney, to determine. The Indian is by nature an orator and an artist. Once he is started on a tale he becomes carried away by the sheer vividness of his imagination. All the glory and the wonder of the West lie handy to his tongue: who but a fool would waste his breath and bore his audience with plain, unvarnished fact? The Indian ends, of course, by believing the tale he tells, no matter how wild and wonderful—just as many white men can, and frequently do.

I chanced on Paul one summer morning on the summit of a high hill in the valley of the South Fork of Flat Creek, close under Mount Head. I was riding up to look at a high spring, and he was just sitting there, motionless, his rifle lying beside him on the grass, his horse grazing nearby. I sat down beside him and he told me a story about the great dome of rock that thrust out from the range, a mile or so to the south of us, between Mount Head and the Holy Cross Mountain—how his grandfather (who may have been any remote ancestor) pursued the king of all Bighorn rams up there, cornered him and fought it out on the edge of the drop. “Eh-h, koná!” he said—and his eyes were shining. “Oh-h, my friend! My grandfather, he’s grab’um by the horns—fight—then throw’um down!” And he pointed to the precipice. “All the way! Piff - paff - pah! Kill!”

There was Paul, now up and kneeling on the kinikinik, tense, his hands reaching forward, his fingers hooked like an eagle’s talons—and you knew that he was no longer with you: he had gone back into the red past of his race, and he was up there himself, on the dome of the rock, hurling the ram into the abyss with his bare hands.

I have heard more about that “grandfather” of Paul’s: how he was a magician as well as a mighty hunter, and a man cunning in battle, giving himself the appearance of three men and arranging it, by his magic, so that his enemies shot their arrows at the false images and not at him—a very practical device, that one, and disheartening for the foe.

Paul hit the long trail three years ago, to the hunting grounds where the game never fails and the white man can never come. He was old and it was time, and the things he loved were no longer as they used to be. His way would be an easy one for, in his active days, the old hunter had sent ahead of him a hundred grizzlies to break the trail …

Most welcome of all the summer migrants on the Buffalo Head was our fishery warden from High River, Sam Smith. When the crocuses were in bloom and the last snowfalls were melting, then we would look for Sam’s arrival. Usually

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