" To the kindness of the various editors is due their
reappearance in more permanent form_.
TO THE DAUGHTERS OF THE WOLF WHO HAVE BRED AND SUCKLED A RACE OF MEN
THE GOD OF HIS FATHERS
I
On every hand stretched the forest primeval,--the home of noisy comedy
and silent tragedy. Here the struggle for survival continued to wage
with all its ancient brutality. Briton and Russian were still to overlap
in the Land of the Rainbow's End--and this was the very heart of it--nor
had Yankee gold yet purchased its vast domain. The wolf-pack still clung
to the flank of the cariboo-herd, singling out the weak and the big with
calf, and pulling them down as remorselessly as were it a thousand,
thousand generations into the past. The sparse aborigines still
acknowledged the rule of their chiefs and medicine men, drove out bad
spirits, burned their witches, fought their neighbors, and ate their
enemies with a relish which spoke well of their bellies. But it was at
the moment when the stone age was drawing to a close. Already, over
unknown trails and chartless wildernesses, were the harbingers of the
steel arriving,--fair-faced, blue-eyed, indomitable men, incarnations of
the unrest of their race.
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