jealousy with which this privilege of the chase was guarded and preserved even to the death explains many national peculiarities, forms, indeed, the keynote to their life of freedom on the plains.

It is possible that the Selish would have been annihilated had not the establishment of new trading-posts enabled them to get fire-arms which the Blackfeet had long possessed. This means of defence gave them fresh strength and thereafter the odds against them were not as great.

The annals of the tribe, so full of tragedy and joy, of fact and fancy, of folk-lore and wood-lore, contain many stories of war glory reminiscent of the days of struggle. Even now there stands, near Ravalli in the Jocko, a rock resembling a man, called by the Indians the Stone Sentinel, which touchingly attests the fidelity and bravery of a nameless hero. The story is that one of the runners who had gone in advance of a war-party after the Indian custom, was surprised while keeping watch and killed by the Blackfeet. The body remained erect and was turned to stone, a monument of devotion to duty so strong that not even death could break his everlasting vigil.

Notwithstanding their love of glory on the war-path and hunting-field, they were a peaceable people. The most beautiful of their traditions are based upon religious themes out of which grew a poetical symbolism, half devotional, half fantastic. And even to-day, in spite of their profession of Christianity, there lives in the heart of the Indian the old paganism, not unlike that of the Greeks, which spiritualizes every object of the woods and waters.

They thought that in the Beginning the good Spirit came up out of the East and the Evil Spirit out of the West, and then began the struggle, typified by light and darkness, which has gone on ever since. From this central idea they have drawn the rainbow Spirit-fancy which arches their dream-sky from horizon to horizon. They consider some trees and rocks sacred; again they hold a lake or stream in superstitious dread and shun it as a habitation of the evil one.

Thus, a cave in the neighbouring hills where rattlesnakes sleep in Winter, they avoided in the past, not on account of the common snakes, but because within the damp, dark recesses of that subterranean den, the King of Snakes, a huge, horned reptile dwelt, appearing occasionally in all his venomous, scaled beauty, striking terror wherever he was seen. A clear spring bubbled near the cave but not even the cold purity of the water could tempt the Indians to that accursed vicinity until by some revelation they learned that the King Snake had migrated to other fastnesses. He is still seen, so they say, gliding stealthily amongst deserted wastes, his crest reared evily, and death in his poison tail.

In contrast to this cave of darkness is the spiritual legend of the Sacred Pine. Upon those same gentle hills of the Jocko it grows, lifting its lessening cone of green toward heaven. It has been there past the memory of the great-grand-fathers of the present generation and from time immemorial it has been held sacred by the Selish tribe. High upon its venerable branches hangs the horn of a Bighorn Sheep, fixed there so firmly by an unknown hand, before even the tradition of the Selish had shaped its ghostly form out of the mists of the past, that the blizzard has not been strong enough to wrench it from its place, nor the frost to gnaw it away. No one knows whence the ram's horn came nor what it signifies, but the tree is considered holy and the Indians believe that it possesses supernatural powers. Hence, offerings are made to it of moccasins, beads, weasel skins, and such little treasures of wearing apparel or handiwork as they most esteem, and at certain seasons, beneath the cool, sweet shadow of its generous boughs the devoted worshippers, going back through the little superficialities of recent civilization to the magnetic pole of their own true blood and beliefs, assemble to dance with religious fervor around its base upon the green. The missionary fathers discourage such idolatrous practices; but the poor children of the woods play truant, nevertheless, and wander back through the cycle of the centuries to do honour to the old, sweet object of their devotion in the primitive, pagan way. And surely the Great Spirit who watches over white and red man impartially, can scarcely be jealous of this tribute of love to a tree,—the instinctive, race-old festival of a woodland tribe.

There is another pine near Ravalli revered because it recalls the days of the chase. It stands upon the face of a mountain somewhat apart from its brethren of the forest, and there the Bighorn Sheep used to take refuge when pursued. If driven to bay, the leader, followed by his band, leaped to death from this eminence. It is known as the Pine of the Bighorn Sheep.

Thus, it will be seen there lives among the Selish a symbolism, making objects which they love chapters in the great unwritten book, wherein is celebrated the heroic past. He who has the key to that volume of tribe-lore, may learn lessons of valour and achievement, of patience and sacrifice. And colouring the whole story, making beautiful its least phase, is the sentiment of the people, even as the haze is the poetry of the hills.

II

As heroic or disastrous events are celebrated in verbal chronicles it follows that the home of the Selish is storied ground. Before the pressure of civilization, encroaching in ever-narrowing circles upon the hunting-ground of the Indians, cramping and crowding them within a smaller space, driving them inch by inch to the confinement which is their death, the Selish wandered at will over a stretch of country beautiful alike in the reality of its landscape and in the richness of myth and legend which hang over every peak and transfigure every lake and stream. To know this country and the people it has sheltered through past centuries one must first glean something of that ephemeral story-charm which records in crag, in mist, in singing stream and spreading tree the dreams made almost real by the thousands of souls who have treasured them, and given them, lip to lip, from old to young, since the forests were first green upon the hills.

The land of the Selish extended eastward to that portion of the Main Range of the Rocky Mountains known to them as Sin-yal-min, or the "Mountains of the Surrounded," from the fact that once a hunting party surrounded and killed a herd of elk by a stream upon those heights; another time a war-party surrounded and slew a company of Blackfeet within the woods upon the mountain side. Though this range marked the eastern boundary of their territory, they hunted buffalo, as we have seen, still east of its mighty peaks,—a region made bloody by battles between the Selish and the Blackfeet tribes. Westward, they wandered over the fertile valley of Sin-yal-min, where they, in common with the Pend d'Oreilles, Kootanais and Nez Percés enjoyed its fruits and fields of grain. This valley is bounded to the north by the great Flathead Lake, a body of water vast in its sweep, winding through narrow channels among wooded shores ever unfolding new and unexposed vistas as one traverses it. On a calm summer day, when the sun's rays are softened by gossamer veils of haze, the water, the mountain-peaks and sky are faintly traced in shades of grey and faded rose as in mother-of-pearl. And on such days as this, at rare intervals, a strange phenomenon occurs,—the reflection of a reflection. Looking over the rail of a steamer within the semi-circular curve of the swell at its stern,