HUNTING WITH RED CROW
When we rode out upon the plain from the valley on our way from the Post
we saw several bands of buffaloes away off to the right and left of the
trail. Red Crow paid no attention to them, and when, at last, I gave him
to understand by signs that I would like to approach the nearest band, a
couple of miles ahead and perhaps that far from the trail, he answered
that we must do our killing on, or close to, the trail so that the women
could put the meat on the pack horses when they came along.
In my hunting back in the forest at home I had learned the value of the
saying about the bird in hand, and I thought that we should go after
that nearest herd because we might not see another so close to the trail
during the day. But I need not have worried; before the day was over I
learned that the game of the plains was as ten thousand to one of the
game of the Eastern forest.
We rode on perhaps three miles farther, and then, topping one of the
many low ridges of the plain, saw an immense herd of buffaloes grazing
on the next ridge, and right on the trail. They were slowly moving
south, and we waited a long time for the last stragglers of the herd to
pass over the ridge and out of sight, and then rode on at an easy lope.
As we neared the top of the ridge Red Crow drew his bow from the case
and quiver at his back, and then drew out four arrows, three of which he
held crosswise in his mouth, fitting the fourth to the bow. I looked
into the pan of my gun and made sure that it was full of powder. And
then my heart began to beat fast; I was soon to have my first shot at a
buffalo! I said to myself: "I must be careful to take good aim! I will
not--will not get excited!"
I thought that when near the top of the ridge we would dismount, go on a
few steps and cautiously rise up and shoot at the nearest of the
buffaloes. But Red Crow never slackened the speed of his horse and I was
obliged to follow his lead. Upon reaching the ridge top we saw the great
herd resting close under us on the slope, some lying down, others
apparently asleep where they stood. But they saw us as soon as we saw
them, and away they went, we after them as fast as our eager horses
could run.
I had never thought that a horse could be so keen for the chase. Mine
just took the bit in his teeth and carried me where he willed. We were
soon right at the edge of the frightened herd. I saw Red Crow, some
thirty or forty yards ahead of me, ride close up to the right side of an
animal and fire an arrow into it, just back of the ribs, and go on
without giving it further attention. And then I realized that my horse
had brought me close to one of the huge, shaggy-headed, sharp-horned
animals, and I poked my gun out and fired, and saw blood almost
instantly begin to gush from its nostrils. It made a few more leaps and
stopped and fell, and I tried to stop my horse beside it as I shouted,
"I have killed a buffalo! I have killed a buffalo!"
But I could not check up the horse, or even turn him, try as I would; a
few jumps more and he had me up beside another animal. Then I wished
that my pistols were in my belt, instead of in my traveling-kit. I
poured a charge of powder from the horn into my hand, but spilled it all
before I could get it to the muzzle of my gun. I tried again with the
same result. I was not used to loading a gun when riding a horse at its
top speed. I gave up the attempt and watched Red Crow, still ahead, and
the huge animals thundering along on either side of me. Clumsily built
though they were, with deep chest, high hump on the shoulders, and cat
hammed, they were far swifter runners than any horse, except for the
first few hundred yards of the start. The horse soon tired; they could
keep up their killing pace for hours, when frightened. After a half-mile
of the chase Red Crow dropped out of it, and I managed to turn my horse
with his and start back over the ground that we had come. Ahead of us
lay three dead buffaloes, and quite near one was standing humped up,
head down, badly wounded. It suddenly dropped and was dead when we rode
up to it. I rode on to the one I had killed, eager to examine it, and
Red Crow followed me. As we approached it he laughed and gave me to
understand that it was an old bull, and therefore no good, its meat too
tough to eat, and he pointed to his three, two young cows and a yearling
bull, as good, fat meat.
I felt sorry that I had uselessly killed the huge animal. I got down
from my horse and examined it. Its massive, sharp-horned, shaggy, and
bewhiskered head; its long knee hair, encircling the legs like
pantalettes, and the great hump on its shoulders were all very odd. In
order to get some idea of its height I lay down on its side, my feet
even with its fore feet. Then I reached up and found that I could
nowhere near touch the top of its hump. It was between six and seven
feet in height!
"One part of it is good," Red Crow signed to me, and got off his horse
and skinned down the bull's lower jaw, and pulled out and back the
tongue through the opening, cut it off at the base, and handed it to me.
I had it that night for my supper, well roasted over the coals, and
thought it the best meat I had ever tasted.
I had been wondering how, with nothing but a knife, the hunters managed
to butcher such large animals as the buffaloes were. Red Crow now showed
me how it was done. We went to the first of his kills, and after
withdrawing the arrow, wiping it clean with a wisp of grass, and
replacing it in the quiver, he twisted the cow's head sharply around
beside the body, the horns sticking into the ground holding it in place.
He then grasped the under foreleg by the ankle, and using it as a lever
gave a quick heave. Lo, the great body rolled up on its back and
remained there propped against the sideways turned head! It was simple
enough. He now cut the hide from tail to neck along the belly, and from
that incision down each leg, and then, I helping in the skinning, we
soon had the bare carcass lying upon its spread-out hide. Then off came
the legs, next the carcass was turned upon its side, an incision was
made all along the base of the hump, and it was broken off by hammering
the ends of the hump, or dorsal ribs, with a joint of a leg cut off at
the knee. Lastly, with a knife and the blows of the leg joint, the ribs
were taken off in two sections, and nothing remained upon the hide but a
portion of the backbone and the entrails. These we rolled off the hide
and the job was done, except tying the portions two by two with strands
of the hide, so that they would balance one another on the pack horse.
We had all three animals butchered before the moving camp came up. Then
Lone Walker's outfit left the line and came out to us, his head wife
supervised the packing of the meat, and we were soon on our way again.
I had had my first buffalo hunt. But I did not know that the buffaloes
were to be my staff of life, my food, my shelter, and my clothing, so
to speak, for nearly seventy years, until, in fact, they were to be
exterminated in the early eighties!
Late in the afternoon of our seventh day out from the fort we went into
camp at the junction of two beautiful, clear mountain streams, as I
afterward learned, the Belly River, and Old Man's River. The former was
so named on account of the broad bend it makes in its course, and the
latter because it is believed that Old Man, when making the world,
tarried long in the mountains at its head and gambled with Red Old Man,
another god. On a mountain-side there is still to be seen a long, smooth
furrow in the rock formation, and at the foot of it several huge stone
balls which the gods rolled along it at the goal.
The timber along these streams was alive with deer and elk, and from the
plains countless herds of buffaloes and antelopes came swarming to them
morning and evening to drink. The chiefs decreed that we should camp
there for some days for hunting and drying meat, and with Red Crow for
my companion I had great sport, killing several of each kind of game. We
would ride out in the morning, followed by Red Crow's sister,
Su-yi-kai-yi-ah-ki, or Mink Woman, riding a gentle horse and leading a
couple of pack horses for bringing in the meat. Of course hundreds of
hunters went out each day, but by picketing each evening the horses we
were to use next day, and starting very early in the morning, we got a
long start of most of them and generally had all the meat we could pack
before noon.
We killed buffaloes mostly, for that was the staple meat, meat that one
never tired of eating. Antelope, deer, and elk meat was good fresh, for
a change, but it did not dry well. As fast as we got the buffalo meat
home, Sis-tsi-ah-ki divided it equally in quality and amount among the
wives, and they cut it into very thin sheets, and hung it in the sun,
and in about two days' time it dried out, and was then packed for
transportation in _parflèches_, large rawhide receptacles shaped like
an envelope, the flaps laced together.
Su-yi-kai-yi-ah-ki was of great help to us in our hunting. We often sent
her into the timber, or around behind a ridge, or up a coulee to drive
game to us, and she seldom failed to do it. She was also an expert
wielder of the knife, able to skin an animal as quickly as either of us.
She was about my age, and tall and slender, quick in all her actions,
and very beautiful. Her especial pride was her hair, which she always
kept neatly done into two long braids. The ends of them almost touched
the ground when she stood up straight. Best of all, she had the same
kind heart and happy disposition as her mother, Sis-tsi-ah-ki.
Let me say here that a woman's or girl's name always terminated in
"ah-ki," the term for woman. For instance, if a man was named after a
bear, he would be called Kyai-yo. If a woman was so named, she would be
Kyai-yo-ah-ki (Bear Woman).
From the junction of Belly River and Old Man's River, we trailed
southwest across the plain to a large stream that I was told was named
Ahk-ai-nus-kwo-na-e-tuk-tai (Gathering-of-Many-Chiefs River), for the
reason that in years gone by the chiefs of the Blackfeet tribes had
there met the chiefs of tribes living on the west side of the mountains,
and concluded a peace treaty with them, which, however, lasted only two
summers. We camped beside the river that evening, and the next day,
following it up in its deep, wide valley, came to the shore of a large
lake from which it ran, and there made camp. Never had I seen so
beautiful a lake, or water so clear, and I said so as well as I could in
signs and my small knowledge of the language I was trying so hard to
learn.
"It is beautiful," Red Crow told me, "but wait until to-morrow; I will
then show you a lake far larger and more beautiful.
"We call these the Lakes Inside," he went on. "See, this lake lies
partly within the mountains. The one above is wholly within them. But
you shall see it all to-morrow."
Over and over I repeated the name for them: Puhkt-o-muk-si-kim-iks
(Lakes Inside), until sure that I would not forget it. Now they are
known as St. Mary's Lakes.
The morning after we camped at the foot of the lake, Red Crow, his
sister, Mink Woman, and I were riding up the east side of the lake soon
after daylight, and before any of the hunters were ready to start out.
We followed a heavy game trail through quaking aspen groves and across
little open, grassy parks, the still water of the lake always in view on
our right, and across it the dark, timbered slope running up to a
flat-topped mountain ending in an abrupt cliff hundreds of feet in
height. We passed a beautiful island close in to our shore, and saw a
small band of elk crossing a grassy opening in its heavy timber. Elk and
deer, and now and then a few buffaloes, were continually getting out of
our way, and once I got a glimpse of a big bull moose as it trotted
into a willow thicket, and learned its name from Red Crow's exclamation,
"Siks-tsi-so!" But I did not know for some time that the word means
"black-going-out-of-sight." A most appropriate name for the shy animal,
for generally that is about all that the hunter sees of it, its dark
hind quarters disappearing in the thick cover it inhabits.
Passing the head of the lower lake, we crossed a half-mile wide prairie
and came to the foot of the upper lake, long, narrow, and running back
between mountains rising steeply to great height from the water's edge.
I have traveled far; from the St. Lawrence to Hudson's Bay, and from it
to the Rockies, and along them south to the Great Salt Lake, but nowhere
have I seen anything to equal the beauty of that lake, and the grandeur
of its surrounding mountains. I fell in love with the place right then.
Red Crow was anxious to go on, but I made him wait until I gazed and
gazed at the wonderful scene before me. It was all so beautiful, and yet
so stern, that it hurt. Grim, cold, defiant were the rocky heights of
the mountains, and blue-black the water of the lake because of its great
depth; but for all that I was fascinated by it all. I felt that I would
like to camp there a long, long time and climb all those tremendous
heights, and explore the whole of the great valley.
"Come!" Red Crow called out at last, and we rode on, crossing the river
on a good ford not far below the foot of the lake, and then following
another big-game trail through more groves and parks along the west side
of the lake. Even here, away back from the plains, were several herds of
buffaloes, and more deer and elk trotting and running from our near
approach. I was more than once tempted to shoot at one of them, but Red
Crow kept signing to me: "Wait! We will kill above here."
At last we arrived at the foot of a long, rocky, and in most places
wall-like ridge that ran from the mountains out across the valley and
ended in a high cliff jutting out over the lake. We left our horses at
the foot of it, followed a game trail up through a break in the wall and
came out on the sparsely timbered, rounding top, grass-grown in places.
Beyond, the lake, mountain walled, ran back several miles farther.
Beyond it a narrow and heavily timbered valley ran away back toward the
summit of the range, where reposed long, high belts of what I thought
was snow, but later learned was glacial ice, leavings of Cold Maker, the
Pi-kun-i say, and his sign that, though the sun has driven him back into
the Far North, he will come again with his winds and snows.
We went on a few paces and Red Crow suddenly stopped and pointed to some
moving white figures high up on the steep side of a red-rocked mountain
ahead and to our right. He made the sign for them: one's forefingers
sloping upward and backward from each side of the head above the ears,
and by that I knew that they had slender, backward curved horns.
"Ai-po-muk-a-kin-a," he called them, meaning "white-big-heads." I had
seen a few skins of the animals at the fort, and the factor had told me
that they were those of the Rocky Mountain ibex.
"We will go up and kill some of them!" Red Crow said, and we began a
climb that lasted for hours. It was my first real mountain climb and I
liked it even though I did shiver and sometimes feel faint, when we made
our way along the edge of cliffs where a slip of the foot would mean the
end for us. We climbed almost straight up and down watercourses; over
steep ridges; and then from one rocky, timbered shelf to another, and at
last approached the place where we had last seen the animals. Red Crow
signed us to be cautious, and with ready bow and arrows led the way
across a wide rock shelf, I close at his heels with my gun well primed
and cocked, and right at my shoulder his sister, just as eager to see
the game as we were. As we neared the edge of the shelf Red Crow
motioned us to step up in line with him, and then we all very carefully
looked down over it and saw the animals.
But there was something going on with them that made Red Crow motion me
to hold still. There were five, all big, white, long-haired males, and
all standing at the edge of the shelf just under us, and looking
intently at something below that we could not see. Their bodies were
much the shape of the buffalo, high over the shoulders, low behind, and
very deep chested; and they had long hair pantalettes at the knees, and
a long beard. But their heads were very different; long, narrow,
flat-faced. Foolish-faced, I thought. Their hair was more of a creamy
color than white, and their horns, round, long, slender, curving back to
a sharp point, were coal black, as were their eyes, nose, and hoofs. But
strangest of all was the attitude of the one on the right of the row; he
was sitting down on his haunches, just as a dog or cat sits, as he
stared down, and such a position for a hoofed animal, a ruminant, was so
odd, so funny, that I almost laughed aloud.
We were not fifty feet above the ibexes, but so intent were they upon
what they were watching that they never looked up. Whatever it was, it
seemed to be on the shelf of rock just below them and moving to the
right, for the ibexes' heads kept turning steadily that way as they
watched it. Then presently we saw what it was: another ibex. He came up
on the shelf that they were on, a very big, old male, and advanced
toward them, and they all turned to face him, backs humped, hair
bristling forward, heads lowered, and one advanced, trotting sideways,
to meet him. He had also bristled up, and we thought that we were to see
a big fight. They met, smelled one another's noses, and leaped into the
air, coming down several feet apart, stood motionless for some time, and
then the one that belonged to the band went back to his companions while
another went forward and through the same performance with the newcomer.
It was a very funny sight.
But I was becoming anxious to shoot. I wanted one of the strange animals
and was afraid that if we delayed firing they might become aware of us
and suddenly take to flight. I nudged Red Crow and signed him to shoot,
and as he raised his bow I aimed at the newcomer, biggest of them all.
Twang, went the bow, and whoom, my gun! My animal fell, as did the one
Red Crow had chosen for his arrow, and both made faint attempts to
regain their feet. The others did not run. Without doubt they had never
heard the report of a gun before, and mistook it for the dropping of a
time-loosened rock from the heights above. They just stood and stared at
their fallen companions, and I drew back from the edge of the shelf and
began reloading my gun, while Red Crow continued firing arrow after
arrow from the bunch he held in his left hand with the bow. I was not
long getting the charge down and pouring priming into the pan, and then
I advanced for another shot.
Can you imagine my surprise when I found that I was too late? All the
little band were down, dead and dying, and, as I looked, the last of
them ceased struggling and lay still! I stared at them, at Red Crow and
his bow, and at my gun. In many ways mine was the better weapon, but for
running buffaloes, and other quick shooting at short range, I saw that
the bow was the thing to use. Right there I determined to get a bow
outfit and learn to use it, and always to carry it on my back, and my
gun in my hands.
We found a place to get down from our shelf to the dead animals, and I
carefully examined mine before skinning it. I found that it had a thick
growth of short wool underneath its long, coarse hair, and after that
never wondered at the ability of its kind to withstand cold. In winter,
the more severe the weather and deep the snow, the higher they range on
the mountains, seeking the bare rock which the fierce winds keep free
from snow, for there grows their favorite food, moss, and several
varieties of lichen.
When I began skinning my kill I was struck by its peculiar odor, just
like that of a muskrat and a hundred times as strong. At the rear base
of each horn I found a wart-like black gland filled with yellowish,
greasy musk. When I finished skinning my animal I began on another, and
we soon had them all skinned. I then took the boss, or dorsal ribs, of
my kill and wrapped them in the two hides I was to carry, although Red
Crow and his sister laughed at me, and gave me to understand that the
meat was not good. I confess that I did not enjoy it. It was coarse and
tough, and musky. However, a young, fat male or female of this high
mountain species is good eating--when no other kind of meat is
obtainable.
While we were preparing to leave the shelf I saw my first bighorns, a
band of ewes and young between us and the lake, and five big rams on the
mountain-side to the south of us. We had no time to go after them, as
the sun was getting low, and anyhow I was well satisfied with our
success of the day. We hurried down the mountain to our horses and
started on the long trail to camp. Whenever we crossed a park and looked
out upon the lake we saw its calm surface broken by the jumping of
hundreds of fish, some of the splashes undoubtedly made by fish of great
size. I afterward found that they were the so-called Mackinaw trout,
running in weight up to forty pounds. Besides them these lakes are full
of cutthroat trout, and what the whites call Dolly Varden trout, and
whitefish.
The sun had set when we crossed the river and the big prairie at the
foot of the upper lake, and started on the trail along the lower lake.
It was almost dark when, hurrying along at a good lope, we crossed the
park opposite the island, and entered a quaking aspen grove. And then,
without warning, Red Crow's horse gave a sudden sideways leap and threw
him, and went snorting and tearing off to the right, and Mink Woman's
and my horses took after him, plunging and kicking with fright, and try
as we would we could not stop them. I saw the girl knocked from her
horse by a projecting, low bough of a cottonwood tree. Behind us Red
Crow was shouting "Kyai-yo! Kyai-yo! Spom-ok-it!" (A bear! A bear!
Help!)
As I could not stop my horse I sprang off him, holding fast to my gun,
passed Mink Woman struggling to her feet, and ran to assist my friend,
his continued cries for help almost drowned by the terrible roars of an
angry bear. Never had I heard anything so terrible. It struck fear to my
heart. I wanted to turn and run from it, but I just couldn't! And there
close behind me came the girl, crying, "Spom-os! Spom-os!" (Help him!
Help him!) I just gritted my teeth and kept on.