Wolves, white and gray, howled about the camp at night,
and their cousin, the coyote, seated in the dusk of evening upright on the
grass, with nose turned to the sky, saluted them with a complication of
yelpings, as if a score of petulant voices were pouring together from the
throat of one small beast." [Footnote: Parkman, "Half-Century of
Conflict," 2 23, 24.]
It is impossible to know how much of this came from his own actual seeing
(for in his journey over the Oregon trail he had passed near the trail of
the Verendrye brothers) and how much came from those scraps of color and
incident picked up in his blindness from varied sources; nor is it of
consequence, except as it connotes something of the quality and character
of his genius, for it is all accurate and the brave brothers Verendrye
move as living men across it. He was able to revivify a dusty document as
well as a personal experience. "To him," as Mr. Barrett Wendell said out
of an intimate acquaintance with him and his work, "a document of whatever
kind,--a state paper, a Jesuit 'relation,' the diary of a provincial
soldier, the record of a Yankee church,--was merely the symbol of a fact
which had once been as real as his own hardships among the western
Indians, or as the lifetime of physical suffering, which never bent his
will.
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