Many things were different for the First Nations of the Plains in the old days, or, as the elders say, the "dog days," an expression whose origin dates back to before the 1720s, when horses had not yet arrived on the northern plains of North America. Those were the days when the plains people hauled their tepees and possessions on travois, V-shaped frames formed from tepee poles laid across the backs of dogs. Dragged behind the dogs, the poles gouged twin ruts across the western Prairies and foothills, permanently marking, over thousands of years, routes like the one known as the Old North Trail, part of which passes a few kilometres to the west of Plain Eagle’s living room.

The Old North Trail is actually a series of ancient paths that extend over a corridor approximately 25 kilometres wide and stretching from the shores of Watson Lake in Yukon Territory to the deserts of New Mexico.

In Canada, the trail roughly tracks what geological and archaeological evidence suggests was the original "ice-free corridor" used by the First Peoples who migrated to the American continents from the frigid reaches of Siberia during an era of reduced ocean levels more than 14,000 years ago, when there was a land bridge across the Bering Strait.

Imagine what the trail would have been like. A lone buckskin-clad traveller packing stone-tool materials north from Montana, atlatl (a device for increasing the velocity of a thrown spear) in hand, might stop to chat with a small band of men, women and children. The latter are perhaps making their way, single file, amid wisps of dust raised by travois being pulled by panting dogs to a buffalo jump 100 kilometres or so over the next grassy rise. A woman in a beaded leather dress might offer to swap the hungry traveller a bag of pemmican for a small shard of obsidian that her husband would use to make a spear point for the hunt.

In the southern half of Alberta and in Montana, one can still see many of the ruts left by the travois, which were pulled first by dogs and later horses. About 80 percent of paths between Calgary and Helena, Montana, are still recognizable (they are, however, more visible south of the border, where there has been less cultivation and development and where there’s more undisturbed rolling ranch land than in Alberta).

"There’s a lot less of the trail left in Canada than in Montana," says Brian Reeves, a heritage resource consultant and professor emeritus of archaeology from the University of Calgary. "Most of the land it traversed in Alberta has been farmed or developed or a road has been built over it." Reeves is a fourth-generation Albertan who spent a career researching the archaeology and history of the southwestern part of the province and the Old North Trail.

NOT FAR FROM Plain Eagle’s house, the trail passes by the towering front ranges of the Rocky Mountains, or, to use the Blackfoot name, Miistakis, meaning backbone, and I have come to visit her and her older sister, Elsie Crowshoe, to learn something of the native lore that surrounds the trail. Plain Eagle turns to her sister, who speaks only Blackfoot, to ask what she learned about the Old North Trail from elders.

Crowshoe’s eyes squint as she stares out the window towards a willow copse on a bank of the Oldman River before replying. Plain Eagle translates her words: "We know all about the trail from Napi, the creator. Our legend has it that he travelled the Old North Trail from south to north, creating the land, plants and animals along the way. He taught us to look at the moon and the birds that fly south in winter – like the ducks and the crows. The earlier they fly south, the harder the winter will be. We could also tell how bad the weather was going to be by looking at the new moon." Plain Eagle illustrates this by drawing a diagram of two different crescent moons, one looking more like a reversed c and the other closer to the letter u.

"The first one here says bad weather is coming, and the other one says it will be mild," she explains. And if there were lots of saskatoons, chokeberries and bullberries, you could tell there was going to be a hard winter – people would go towards the mountains and valleys for shelter, wood, game and water."

The Old North Trail is actually two separate trail systems, an inner one that runs through the foothills of the Rockies and an outer one that follows a route through the prairie. "In the summer, people could make better time on the prairie, without the hills, rivers and bushes to get in the way," Plain Eagle interprets. "There was always game around in the summer. People would camp near the buffalo jumps. But in the winter it was too dangerous on the open prairie, so our people would travel in the foothills, where there was more shelter, wood and game and less wind."

Reeves has researched most of the inner and outer trail systems from north of Calgary to the southern border of Montana. From the air, he says, one can identify the trail by the vegetation, which is different where the ancient tracks have grown over. Walking parts of the trail, he has discovered stone cairns and animal effigies that link to Blackfoot folklore. "There are a number of spots in Alberta where you can see features that relate to the trail," Reeves says, "starting right in Calgary." He talks about some circles of stone, four metres in diameter, that are located on the edge of Nose Hill Park in the north-central part of the city. The circles, he explains, would have been used in ceremonies such as sun dances.

For 10,000 years, this area was grassland; in places the grass would have been as thick as a palomino’s mane. Today, only the park remains so. Looking at new housing developments, a railway, a power line, a paved cycle path and the highways that surround the park, I find it hard to imagine the area as it must have been in its heyday, with smoking campfires, dogs running free and children playing against a backdrop of painted tepees. The only reminder that the trail once passed through the area is a plaque that briefly outlines its history.

Fifty-four kilometres south of Calgary, I turn west off Highway 2 and pass through flat prairie. Eventually, the scene is broken by a gorge that appears suddenly. Just across it, to the south, I spot a rocky cliff that would be impossible to detect if approached from the other side, a fact that hunters through the millennia took full advantage of. Less than a kilometre from where the outer trail crosses the gully, this is the Old Woman’s Buffalo Jump.

"You had to be a brave guy to do this," Kyle Blood, an interpretive guide at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, 90 kilometres to the south, tells me a few days later. The wind rustles his hair as he stands above the cliff overlooking a section of the trail. "Warriors had to have completed their vision quest, which they did around the age of 14, before they were allowed in the hunt," he explains.

Cliffs that the buffalo couldn’t detect until they were at the edge of them were selected as the jumps. An elaborate system of drive lanes created by ancient hunters channelled the herd towards the clifftop. The animals were contained by the young men, who disguised themselves as buffalo calves or coyotes and hid behind stone cairns and bushes, which served as channel markers. They would pop out every now and then. The beasts would become confused, and in the ensuing pandemonium of thundering hooves and dust, they would follow one another over the cliff. Hunters at the bottom of the jump would move in with spears or arrows to kill the animals quickly.

After the hunt, camps would be busy as hides were removed, stretched onto frames, scraped and rubbed with brains to cure them. Huge boiling pits would steam and bubble with meat and bones. There was a use for every part of the buffalo; following a hunt, there would be hide for tepees, pemmican, bags, bone tools, rawhide ropes and more. "The Plains people would even make special blankets for babies, curing buffalo calfskin until it was very soft," Plain Eagle told me.

The wooded riverbanks also provided sustenance to those travelling along the trail. Setting up my tent close to where the trail once passed, in a sheltered corner of what is now Willow Creek Provincial Park near Stavely, Alta., I catch glimpses of white-tailed deer bounding into the willows and a great blue heron landing on the creek. Here, one can find old tepee rings – formed from stones that were laid around the edges of tepees to hold them down.

"Willow Creek was an old camping area," Reeves has told me. "It would have been typical of the larger campsites along the trail."

First Peoples would stop at spots like this to harvest food such as prairie turnips or camass root, a turniplike staple. According to an early account of life along the trail, The Old North Trail: Life, Legends and Religion of the Blackfeet Indians, by Walter McClintock, the root was placed between layers of grass and leaves on top of hot stones at the bottom of a pit. A fire would be built on top and the camass left to bake for two days. When done, it provided food for many days’ travel.

Walter McClintock was a Scottish American adventurer who travelled the Old North Trail with a group of Blackfoot at the turn of the century. He had gone to northwestern Montana with the Forest Service of the United States in the 1880s and had befriended a Blackfoot man named Siksikakoan, who invited McClintock to his reservation. From 1896 to 1900, McClintock lived with the band, and in 1910 wrote his account.

"My father named me Running Wolf, and I believe that, by nature, I am like the wolf, for I love to roam over the prairies and among the mountains," Chief Brings-Down-the-Sun told McClintock during their many months on the trail.

"No one knows how long it [the trail] has been used by the Indians," the chief explained to McClintock. "My father told me it originated in the migration of a great tribe of Indians from the distant north to the south, and all the tribes have, ever since, continued to follow in their tracks. I have followed the Old North Trail so often that I know every mountain, stream and river far to the south, as well as towards the distant north."

Brings-Down-the-Sun also talked about an expedition that travelled south on the trail to visit "the people with dark skins" (Mexicans). He talked of a 12-year-old boy named Pemmican who had gone on the trip and who had died, at age 95, only a few years before McClintock met Brings-Down-the-Sun: "It took them twelve moons of steady travelling to reach the country of the dark-skinned people, and eighteen moons to come north again. They returned by a longer route through the ‘High Trees’ or Bitter Root country, where they could travel without danger of being seen. They feared going along the North Trail because it was frequented by their enemies, the Crows, Sioux and Cheyennes."

The trail played an important role as a place of commerce. "One of its most important functions would have been for trading obsidian and chert [the raw materials of stone tools] from quarries in Wyoming and southern Montana to people from more northern areas, who would work them into weapons and tools," Reeves said.

A lone traveller on foot could move 30 to 50 kilometres a day along the outer trail, Reeves reckoned. But he suggested that whole bands, travelling together with full gear, would only have made 12 to 15 kilometres a day. They would stay at clusters of campsites at wooded, game-rich river crossings like Willow Creek.

Sections of the outer trail pass through bald open plain, where it would be easy to lose one’s way. "Travellers would use landmarks such as trees to guide their way. Wooden markers would tell people which way the trail went," Crowshoe explained through her sister.

Not far from the Willow Creek campground, I climb to the top of a ridge where one of these navigational aids, a split erratic boulder the size of a small cabin, perches alone like a sentinel scanning the horizon. These erratics (large boulders ranging in size from small desks to warehouses, which were transported from the mountains around Jasper, Alta., south on the backs of glaciers during the last ice age) were common trail markers. The view from my windy promontory is breathtaking – I can see far into the distance all around me.

I drive about 40 kilometres west of Willow Creek Provincial Park to a spectacular tract of foothills popularly known as the Whaleback, which forms part of the Rocky Mountains Forest Reserve. The inner trail system threads its way here among the trees that patch the sides of the foothills. Sharp-tailed grouse forage among raspberries and wild strawberries that carpet the forest floor beneath cottonwoods and quaking aspens.

From the Whaleback, I head south via Highway 6 towards Waterton Lakes National Park and intercept the inner trail system where it cuts through Indian Springs Ridge. The steep face of Chief Mountain, sacred to the Blackfoot, stares down at me from Montana. I decide to spend the night in Cardston, Alta., which lies on the edge of the outer trail.

MY FINAL NIGHT on the trail I spend at the Belly River campground, close to where the inner trail disappears from Canada into the eastern foothills of the Montana Rockies. At three o’clock in the morning, answering a call of nature, I crawl groggily from my tent and am bedazzled by dancing pastel blues, greens and yellows pulsating across the black sky. I can’t help but think of the Blackfoot camping here under the stars 1,000 years ago and more and wondering what these flamboyant spirits were telling them. According to Plain Eagle, when the northern lights are bright, they foretell the arrival of a fierce wind and bad weather.

The big wind never came, but winds of change continue to transform Plain Eagle’s Blackfoot country, where once men, women and children roamed prairie and hills along the Old North Trail.

Illustrations: Oleg Koulikov