NORTHERN INTERIOR OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

The spectacle which met Khadintel’s eyes on his return
to his village was indeed heart-rending. On the ground,
lying bathed in pools of blood, were the bodies of his own
two wives and of nearly all his countrymen, while hanging
on transversal poles resting on stout forked sticks planted
in the ground, were the bodies of the children ripped open
and spitted through the out-turned ribs in exactly the same
way as salmon drying in the sun. Two such poles were
loaded from end to end with that gruesome burden.

Aided by his two companions, Khadintel religiously
burnt all the bodies, and placed the bones which had
partially escaped destruction in leather satchels adorned
with long fringes which, in the course of time, he entrusted
to the care of the surviving relatives of Khalhpan’s
victims. Then he prepared the vengeance due to such an
unprovoked crime and, early in the spring of the third year
after the massacre, he found himself at the head ofa large
band of braves he had gathered from among the few sur-
vivors of the Chinlac population and the allied villages of
Thachek, Nulkreh (Stony Creek) and Natleh (Fraser Lake).

Having reached the Chilcotin valley, at a place which,
from the topographical details now furnished by the old
men, must be identified with the plain where the modern
village of Anarhem stands, the avenging party beheld
from the top of the third terrace, or last of the superposed
plateaus, in the thickets of which they discreetly passed
the night, a long row of lodges, indicating a very large
population.

Khalhpan, the Chilcotin chieftain, had a younger brother
known as ’Kun’qus, a man most powerfully built and of a
very amiable disposition. Expecting reprisals for his
brother’s misdeed, that influential Chilcotin had built a
palisade round his house, wherein he lived with a wife
taken from among his own tribe and a second partner, a

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