The
party had not been delayed; no time lost. In the morning his mother
cooked the breakfast over the camp-fire, and capped it with a
fifty-mile ride into the next sun-down.
The trapper father had come of the sturdy Welsh stock which trickled
into early Ohio out of the jostling East, and the mother was a nomadic
daughter of the Irish emigrant settlers of Ontario. From both sides
came the Wanderlust of the blood, the fever to be moving, to be pushing
on to the edge of things. In the first year of his life, ere he had
learned the way of his legs, Jacob Welse had wandered a-horse through a
thousand miles of wilderness, and wintered in a hunting-lodge on the
head-waters of the Red River of the North. His first foot-gear was
moccasins, his first taffy the tallow from a moose. His first
generalizations were that the world was composed of great wastes and
white vastnesses, and populated with Indians and white hunters like his
father. A town was a cluster of deer-skin lodges; a trading-post a
seat of civilization; and a factor God Almighty Himself. Rivers and
lakes existed chiefly for man's use in travelling. Viewed in this
light, the mountains puzzled him; but he placed them away in his
classification of the Inexplicable and did not worry. Men died,
sometimes. But their meat was not good to eat, and their hides
worthless,--perhaps because they did not grow fur.
Pages:
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65