We reach the hills of the Wolverine—Something moves far out upon the plains—The wounded Cree—His story—Adventure with a grizzly bear—Left alone—A long crawl for life—Hunger, thirst, and travail—A grizzly again—“The Great Spirit, like an eagle, looks down upon the prairie”—Saved—Watched.
In five days’ easy travel, riding each day at a kind of amble, half trot half walk, we reached the hills of the Wolverine, a low range of ridges surrounded upon all sides by a vast plain. We pitched camp close beside a small lake which was situated nigh the western extremity of the group of hills, and from the top of a ridge behind the lodge the eye ranged over an expanse the greater part of which was destitute of trees.
It was the Indian’s wont every evening, after camp had been made, to make a long circuit around the camping-place armed with his fowling-piece. From these excursions he usually returned at dusk, bringing with him a brace of wild ducks or a few prairie grouse for the morning meal.
On the evening of our arrival at the Touchwood Hills he and I set out as usual upon this evening ramble, leaving[68] Donogh to look after the camp. Ascending the ridge I have spoken of, we surveyed intently the plain which stretched from the base of the hill on which we stood until it was lost to sight in the western horizon. It was so vast a prospect that the eye wandered over it for a length of time ere it could note even the nearer portion that lay well within the range of vision. The Sioux took a long survey of the scene. Shading his eyes with his hands, he slowly traversed the great circle of the horizon; then his gaze sought the nearer landscape, passing along it in a manner that left no portion of the field of sight unscanned. As thus he looked, his slow-moving eyes all at once became steadily fixed upon one object set within the mid-distance of the scene. To an ordinary eye it appeared a speck, a rock, or a bush, or perhaps some stray wolf roving the plain in search of food; to the quick eye of the Sioux it was none of these things. It moved very slowly in the landscape; it appeared to stop at times and then to go on again, keeping generally the same direction. It was slowly approaching the Wolverine Hills. At last the Sioux seemed to satisfy himself as to the nature of this slow-moving object. Quitting the summit, he descended with rapid steps to the camp, caught his horse, told me to secure mine, passed a piece of leather into his mouth as bridle, and springing upon his bare back and calling upon me to follow, set off at a gallop into the plain in the direction of the strange[69] object.
His eyes all at once became fixed upon one object set within the mid-distance.
It yet wanted about half an hour of sunset, and by riding hard we would reach the spot ere night had closed in; for darkness comes quickly on the heels of the day in the prairie, and though a lustrous after-glow lives sometimes in the western sky, the great plain instantly grows dim when the sun has gone beneath the horizon. From the lower level of the plain at the foot of the hills no sign was visible of the object which he had seen from the summit; but this mattered little to the Sioux, whose practised eye had taken in the line of direction by other objects, and his course was now held straight upon his mark.
When we reached the neighbourhood of the spot in which he had last seen the moving object, he pulled up his horse and looked around him on every side. There was nothing to be seen. The plain lay around us motionless and silent, already beginning to grow dark in the decreasing light. A man gifted with less acute sight would have rested satisfied that the moving object which he had looked upon was a wild animal—a wolf or a wolverine, whose sharp sense of sound alarmed at the approach of man, had caused it to seek concealment; but the Indian had noticed certain peculiarities in the object that led him to form other conclusions regarding its nature. In a loud, clear voice he called out in an Indian language that he was a friend, and that whoever was near need have no fear to discover[70] himself.
“It is the Red Cloud who speaks,” he said. “No Indian need fear to meet him.” Scarcely had he thus spoken when from a dry watercourse near at hand there rose up a figure which seemed in the twilight to be that of a man who was unable to lift himself fully upon his feet. He was distant about one hundred yards from us, and it was evident from the manner in which he drew himself out of the depression in which he had lain concealed from sight, that he had difficulty in making any movement. As the figure emerged from the hollow, it resumed the crouching attitude which had been first noticed. We were soon beside this strange apparition. It proved to be a young Indian of the Cree nation, a man so spent and worn, so thin in face and figure, and so tattered in dress, that he scarcely resembled a human being. He was utterly unable to rise from a kneeling position. One arm hung at his side, broken below the elbow; one leg was painfully dragged after him along the ground; his leather dress hanging in tatters upon his back showed many cuts and bruises upon his body. The Sioux spoke a few words to this wretched object; but the man answered in such a broken voice and rambling manner that little could be gleaned from what he said.
The Sioux having dismounted for a better examination of this maimed creature, now lifted him without difficulty on to his own horse; then mounting himself, we set off at[71] an easy pace for the camp. The man now appeared quite senseless, his head and feet hanging down the horse’s sides like that of a dead body. The night had quite closed in when we rounded the base of the outer line of hills and came full into the firelight of the camp. Donogh was astonished to see us bearing back to camp an apparently lifeless body, which was immediately taken from the horse and laid on the ground before the fire.
The warmth of the fire, and a drink of hot tea which was soon given him, brought consciousness back again to the poor creature. For a while he looked wildly and vacantly around, seemed slowly to take in the new state of existence that had so quickly come to him, then he seized the vessel of tea that Donogh was holding near his lips and drained it to the dregs. Some time elapsed, however, ere he could answer in a collected manner the questions put to him by the Sioux, but by degrees the following story was elicited. It ran thus:—
“More than forty days ago I quitted a camp of Crees near the Lone Mountain prairie to go south on the war-trail, there were fourteen of us in all; our horses were fat, and we travelled fast. On the fifth day we reached the woody hills. There were no Indians near, and we began to hunt buffalo, which were numerous over all the prairies south of the Qu’appelle river.
“It was about the tenth day that one of our party, who had gone out with the horses in the morning, came back to camp saying that he had struck the trail of a large grizzly bear some little distance from where we lay. Four of us started out with him to hunt the bear; I was one of them. We soon struck the trail. The bear had crossed a ravine and ascended a steep bank beyond; the side of this bank was covered with cotton-wood thicket. We followed the trail right into the thicket; we were all on foot. All at once we heard, as we walked in file along the trail, a heavy tread sounding close at hand, and a loud breaking of branches and dry sticks. Then appeared in front the object of our chase. He was a very large grizzly, and so wicked that he did not wait for us to attack him, but came all at once full upon us.
“I stood second in the line. The foremost brave sprang aside to enable me to fire, and also to get clear of our line himself. I levelled my gun and fired full upon the huge beast; one or two other shots sounded about me, but I saw through the smoke that the bear had not been killed by them—he was advancing right upon me. I stepped back on one side, with the intention of running until I could again load my gun, but at that instant the upraised root of a tree caught my foot, and I fell full upon the ground almost at the feet of the advancing animal, now doubly maddened by the wounds he had received. I had only time to draw my knife from my belt when he was full upon me. I struck[73] blindly at him, but it was no use, his claws and his teeth were fastened in my flesh; I was bruised, wounded and torn ere I could repeat the blow with my knife. Then I heard two or three shots above my head, a heavy crushing weight fell upon me, and I knew no more.
“When next I knew what was passing around me everything was changed. I was a helpless cripple; my leg and my arm had both been broken; I was torn all over my body. My companions had carried me back to camp, but what could they do with me? They were all braves whose work is war and the chase; our women and old men lay far away, six long days’ riding, ten easy days’ travel. Besides we were on the war-path. At any moment the Blackfeet might appear. I would be worse than useless to my friends, I would be a burden to them. I read their thoughts in their faces, and my mind was made up.
“‘Dry plenty of buffalo meat,’ I said to them; ‘put it where my hand can reach it; lay me by the edge of the stream of water; then go away and leave me to die here. Destroy the trail as you go away, so that no one will ever find the spot, and my scalp will not hang in the lodge of a Blackfoot.’
“They did as I told them; they put beside me a pile of dry buffalo meat; they loaded my gun and left it at my right hand, so that I could defend myself against a wild beast while my life lasted; and they laid my blanket by the edge[74] of a stream of water, so that I could get drink without moving; then one by one they wished me good-bye, and I saw them depart for ever.
“It was the middle of the day when they thus left me. When they were all gone and I could no more hear the sound of man or horse, I felt very lonely, and wished to die. I saw the daylight growing dim and the night coming down through the trees. Then I felt hungry, and taking some meat from the pile beside me, I ate it, drank some water, and slept.
“When I awoke next morning I felt better. My leg and arm were both useless, but my flesh-wounds were beginning to heal, and I did not seem so weak as I had been. That day passed, and another, and another. I began to get accustomed to the solitude, and to watch everything around me. Two whiskey jacks came and sat looking at me on a branch close to my head. I threw small bits of meat to them, and at last they came so close that they took the food from my hand and hopped over my body. I was glad to have them, they were company to me during the long daylight hours. About ten days passed, and I was still alive—alive, and gaining strength day by day. What was to be done? I looked at my store of meat, and saw that it could not last more than ten days; after that time I would starve to death. I began to think very anxiously on what I could do to save myself from this death. To stay where I was, meant to die a lingering death after ten days. I thought I would try to move and practise myself in moving even on my hands and knees. Each day I crept more and more about the thicket in which I had been. I crept to the edge of it and looked out over the plains. They lay around me to the north and west far as my eye could reach. They never seemed so large to me before. I saw buffalo feeding a long way off towards the north; that was the way we had come. My camp lay away in that direction—but so far. I thought over the direction in my mind; I remembered all the streams we had crossed, the places where we had camped, the hills and the valleys we had passed: it seemed as long as a dream at night.
“For four days I kept moving to and fro, crawling on hands and knees about the thicket. I began to go farther and farther away from it, and each day I found I could move faster. I had the use of one leg and one arm quite strong; the other arm was sound to the elbow, but the hand was helpless; my left leg had been broken below the knee. I felt much pain when I moved, but that did not matter; anything was better than lying in the trees waiting for death. On the sixth day after this I put together all that remained of my dry meat store, and with nothing but my knife in my belt (I never could have carried my gun), I crawled forth from the camp in which I had lain during so many days. I held my slow way towards the north[76] almost along the same line we had travelled but a month earlier, when we swept so swiftly along over the prairie.
“For many hours I plodded on. It seemed as though I could never get out of sight of the thicket; often I looked back, and there it was still close to me; at last the night hid it from sight, and I stretched my aching limbs upon the ground.
“All next day I went on. About noon I came to a stream, drank deeply, and washed my wounds in the cool water; again I crawled on towards the north, and slept again in the middle of the plain.
“By the fifth day I had finished the last scrap of my meat. I now looked about anxiously for the bodies of buffalo that had been killed. On our journey down we had killed many buffaloes, and I was now passing over ground where we had hunted twenty days before; but it is one thing to look for buffalo on horseback, and another thing to seek for it lying level upon the ground. I could not see far before or around me; sometimes I crawled to the top of a hillock for a wider survey of the plain. The night came, I lay down without food or water. Next morning I began to move as soon as it was light enough to see. I made for a small hill that stood a little to one side of my line; from its top I saw, a long distance away from my course, a small black speck. I knew it to be a dead buffalo. I made for it, but it was noon when I had reached it. I ate a little, then cut[77] with my knife as much as I could carry, and set out to find water, for I was very thirsty. I held on in the direction of a valley I had noticed from the top of a hill. It was sunset when I got to it, and to my great joy I found water; then I ate a great deal of my meat and drank plentifully of the water, and lay down to sleep, happy.
“The next morning I ate and drank again, and then set out once more. Day by day I went on; sometimes I dragged myself all day along, starving and thirsty; sometimes I had to lie down at night with burning throat; sometimes I came to a buffalo, so long killed that of his flesh the wolves had left nothing except the skin and muscle of the head and hide. At night when I had got no food during the day I used to dream of old times, when the camp had feasted upon freshly-killed buffalo, when the squaws had dressed the tongues; and at other times I thought I had some moose noses before me, and was seated in my lodge while the briskets were being boiled over the fire in the centre; and then my lips would open and close, and I heard my teeth strike together as though I had been eating, and I woke to find I was weak and hungry, and that only the great dark prairie lay around me.
“At last I lost all count of the days. I only thought of three things—food, drink, and the course I had to travel. My pain had become so much my life that I had ceased to think about it. One day I was as usual dragging myself[78] along when I noticed right in front of me an object that filled my heart with terror. Before me, over the ridge of an incline which I was ascending, appeared two small pointed objects. They were sharply seen against the sky over the rim of the ridge. I knew instantly what they were. I knew that under these two small pointed objects there were the head and body of a grizzly bear. He was lying there right in my onward path, watching for buffalo. I knew that he had seen me while afar, and that he now awaited my approach, thinking that I was some wild animal of whose capture he was certain.
“I laid myself flat upon the ground, and then I drew away to the left, and when I had gained what I had deemed sufficient distance I again tried to ascend the incline; but again, full in my front, I saw the dreaded pointed tips over the prairie ridge. The bear had seen me as I moved to the left, and he too had gone in that direction to intercept me on the brow of the hill. Again I laid myself flat upon the prairie and crawled away to one side, this time taking care not to attempt to cross the ridge until I had gone a long way to the flank. Creeping very cautiously up the hill, I looked over the ridge. The bear was nowhere to be seen. I made all haste to leave behind the spot so nearly fatal to me, and continuing to crawl long after night had fallen, I at length lay down to sleep, feeling more tired, and hungry, and exhausted, than I had yet been since I set[79] out first upon my long journey. That was only a few days since. Three days ago I came in sight of these hills, they filled my heart with hope; but only last night I had again to lie exposed to a great danger—a band of Indians passed me making for these hills. I could hear them speaking to one another as they went by; they were Assineboine Indians on the war-path; they were so close that some of their horses scented me, for I heard one say, ‘Fool, it is only a wolf you start from.’
“This morning I almost gave up hope of ever reaching succour. I knew my people must have left these hills, or else the Stonies could not have been there. Then I thought that some of their scouts would be sure to see me on the plain, and that it would be better to lie down in some watercourse and die there, than to die at the hands of my enemies and have my scalp hung at the mane of an Assineboine’s horse; but when I thought of all that I had gone through—of how, when I had been dying of thirst, water had lain in my track—of how I had found food when starving,—I took hope again, and said to myself, ‘The Great Spirit sees me. Like an eagle in the mid-day, His eye is cast down upon the prairie; He has put food and water on the plain; He has shielded me from the grizzly, and wrapt the night around me when my enemies passed near me. I will not lie down and die; I will go on still, in hope.’
“Well, I went on, and it grew dark once more. I was determined to drag on until I reached these hills, for I knew that there was plenty of water here. Then all at once I heard the noise of a horse’s hoofs, and I hid myself, thinking it was an Assineboine scout; and then I heard your voice, and I knew that I was safe.”
Such was the story.
The poor fellow spoke in his native tongue, which the Sioux understood, and as to him many Indian dialects were familiar, interpreted to me as we sat at the camp fire. The Red Cloud, familiar as his life had made him with every phase of hardship of Indian existence on the great prairie, had never before met with such a singular instance of Indian fortitude and perseverance as this was; but the concluding portion of the Cree’s narrative had roused other thoughts in his mind, and to these he directed his questions.
“The Assineboines that passed by you last night,” he said, “how many might they have numbered?”
“They were but few,” answered the Cree; “about fifteen men.”
“What part of the hills were they making for?”
“They were on a line that would lead them north of where we now are.”
The Sioux remained silent for some time. He was thinking deeply upon the presence of this war-party. It boded trouble in the future. It was true he had quarrel with no Indian tribe; but a small war-party of fifteen braves[81] is not particular on the score of cause of enmity, and if horses are to be captured or scalps taken, it usually matters little whether actual war has been declared beforehand; and the adage that those who are not with me are against me, holds good on such wild raids as that upon which the party seen by the Cree were now bound. Thinking out many different courses, and weighing well their various probabilities of success or failure, the Sioux at length wrapped himself in his blanket and lay down to rest. We had spread a blanket for the Cree, and had done all we could to make him comfortable. At first the poor creature seemed scarcely to understand the meaning of so much kindness and attention from a stranger. Under the influence of a good supper he soon forgot the fearful hardships which he had so lately passed through, and the full realization of his immediate safety seemed to obliterate all anxiety for the future. And yet, as he now lay by the camp fire of his preserver there was as much danger hanging over him as ever had threatened him in the darkest moment of his terrible journey.
Over the brow of a hill close by, a pair of watchful eyes were looking into the camp, intently noting every movement in and around it.