Chief of Scouts | Page 8

the Utes made till the Sighewashes came back to us. When they came back they were laughing and said to us, "Utes heap good." Then I was satisfied that we were in no danger.
We traveled on some five or six miles when we came to a nice little stream of water where there was fine grass. I said to the boys, "We'll camp here. Now you boys unpack the animals and take them out to grass, and I will go and kill some meat for supper."
I picked up my gun and started; I didn't go over a quarter of a mile till I saw four Bison cows, and they all had calves with them. I crawled up in shooting distance and killed one of the calves. At the crack of my gun the cows ran away. I commenced dressing the calf and here came four of my Sighewash Indians running to me, and when they saw what I had killed, I believe they were the happiest mortals that I ever saw.
As soon as I got the insides out I told them to pick up the calf and we would go to camp. Some of them picked up the carcass and others picked up the entrails. I told them we did not want the entrails. One of the Indians spoke up and said, "Heap good, all same good meat". I finally persuaded them to leave the insides alone.
When we got back to camp, the boys had a good fire, and it was not long before we had plenty of meat around the fire, and I never saw Indians eat as they did that night. After they had been eating about an hour, Jonnie West said to me, "Will, you will have to go and kill more meat, or we won't have any for breakfast."
We soon turned in for the night and left the Indians still cooking. In the morning we were surprised to see the amount of meat they had got away with. What they ate that night would have been plenty for the same number of white men three or four days. The nature of the Indian is to eat when he has the chance and when he hasn't he goes without and never complains.
For the next three days we traveled through a country well supplied with game, especially Elk, Deer, and black bear. It was now late in the summer and all game was in a fine condition, it was no unusual thing to see from twenty five to a hundred Elk in a band. I have never seen since that time so many Elk with so large horns as I saw on that trip, which convinced me that there had been no white hunters through that part of the country before.
In traveling along there were times we were not out of sight of deer for hours; consequently we never killed our game for supper until we went into camp, and as a rule, the boys always picked me to get the meat while they took care of the horses. I remember one evening I was just getting ready to start out on my hunt. I asked the boys what kind of meat they wanted for supper. Jonnie West said, "Give us something new." Well, I answered, "How will a cub bear do?" They all answered, "That is just what we want." That moment I turned my eyes to the south, and on a ridge not more than three hundred yards from camp, I saw three bears eating sarvis berries. I was not long in getting into gun shot of them. There was the old mother bear and two cubs. I had to wait several minutes before I could get a good sight on the one I wanted, as they were in the brush and I wanted a sure shot. I fired and broke his neck; he had hardly done kicking before Jonnie West and some of the Indians were there. We made quick work getting the meat to camp and around the fire cooking, and it was as fine a piece of meat as I ever ate.
The next morning we bid the Indians good bye, but before they left us one of them stooped down and with a finger marked out the route we should take, thinking we did not know the country we must pass over, and strange to say, the route this wild Indian marked out in the sand was accurate in every particular. He made dots for the places where we should camp and a little mark for a stream of water, then little piles of sand for mountains, some large and some small, according to the size of the mountain we were to cross. After he had finished his work, I examined the diagram