Excerpt from Old Indian Trails: Incidents of Camp and Trail Life, Covering Two Years' Exploration Through the Rocky Mountains of Canada But the tide swept on: With jealous eyes we watched the silence slipping back, the tin cans and empty fruit-jars strew our sacred soil, the mark of the axe grow more obtrusive, even the trails cleared of the debris so hard to master, yet so precious from the fact it must be mastered to succeed. Where next? Driven from our Eden, where should our tents rise again? We were grow ing lost and lonesome in the great tide which was sweeping across our playground, and we longed for wider views and new untrammelled ways. With willing ears we listened to the tales brought in by the hunters and trappers, those men of this land who are the true pioneers of the country in spite of the fact that they have written nothing and are but little known. With hearts not entirely on pelts, they had seen and now told us of valleys of great beauty, of high unknown peaks, of little known rivers, of un-named lakes, lying to the north and north-west of the country we knew so well, - a fairyland, yet a land girt about with hardships, a land whose highway was a difficult trail or no trail at all. We fretted for the strength of man, for the way was long and hard, and only the tried and stalwart might venture where cold and heat, starvation and privation stalked ever at the explorer's heels. In meek despair we bowed our heads to the inevitable, to the cutting knowledge of the superiority of the endurance of man and the years slipped by. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.