STILL PRE-EVUROPEAN TIMES

Time went on without softening his hostile sentiments.
’"Kwah would offer him the first-fruits of his hunts, only to
see them thrown away with disdain. One day, when he
was embarking in a small canoe in order to follow his
wife, who had just left with the family impedimenta in a
craft of her own, Arrow-Heart appeared on the bank, and
in a shrill voice addressed him thus :

“You good-for-nothing orphan, who live on the bones of
the village, why did you take my axe away from me?”

Wounded to the quick by those epithets, than which none
can be more opprobrious in the eyes of a Déné,t’Kwah
seized his bow and arrows and shot his insulter through
the heart. This was the signal for his quondam partner
in gambling to spring out of his lodge in hot pursuit of
the now retreating homicide, who made for the south as
swiftly as the sluggish stream and his own exertions
would allow. Finding his progress too slow by water, he
landed and darted away, keeping close to the river, where
he soon overtook his wife, who was paddling leisurely in
her own canoe. Together they crossed to the eastern
side, and both started for the hunting-grounds of friendly
Sekanais, among whom they stayed a full year or more.

At length, deeming the anger and resentment of Arrow-
Heart’s people sufficiently cooled down, he returned to
Stuart River with a plentiful provision of dressed skins,
which he publicly distributed as an atonement for his deed.

By that time, however, the Sekanais themselves were in
no very happy position, owing to a circumstance which
none of them could have foreseen. Aborigines of the
eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains,? they had been

1. In the eyes of the Dénés there is no condition so lowly as that of an
orphan or a widow.

2. As proved by their own language and by the following statement of
Harmon, one of the first white men who ever came in contact with them (a

2)