Shaw And I Were Riding Together,
And Henry Chatillon Was Alone, A Few Rods Before Us; He Stopped His
Horse Suddenly, And Turning Round With The Peculiar Eager And Earnest
Expression Which He Always Wore When Excited, He Called To Us To Come
Forward.
We galloped to his side.
Henry pointed toward a black
speck on the gray swell of the prairie, apparently about a mile off.
"It must be a bear," said he; "come, now, we shall all have some
sport. Better fun to fight him than to fight an old buffalo bull;
grizzly bear so strong and smart."
So we all galloped forward together, prepared for a hard fight; for
these bears, though clumsy in appearance and extremely large, are
incredibly fierce and active. The swell of the prairie concealed the
black object from our view. Immediately after it appeared again.
But now it seemed quite near to us; and as we looked at it in
astonishment, it suddenly separated into two parts, each of which
took wing and flew away. We stopped our horses and looked round at
Henry, whose face exhibited a curious mixture of mirth and
mortification. His hawk's eye had been so completely deceived by the
peculiar atmosphere that he had mistaken two large crows at the
distance of fifty rods for a grizzly bear a mile off. To the
journey's end Henry never heard the last of the grizzly bear with
wings.
In the afternoon we came to the foot of a considerable hill. As we
ascended it Rouville began to ask questions concerning our conditions
and prospects at home, and Shaw was edifying him with a minute
account of an imaginary wife and child, to which he listened with
implicit faith. Reaching the top of the hill we saw the windings of
Horse Creek on the plains below us, and a little on the left we could
distinguish the camp of Bisonette among the trees and copses along
the course of the stream. Rouville's face assumed just then a most
ludicrously blank expression. We inquired what was the matter, when
it appeared that Bisonette had sent him from this place to Fort
Laramie with the sole object of bringing back a supply of tobacco.
Our rattle-brain friend, from the time of his reaching the Fort up to
the present moment, had entirely forgotten the object of his journey,
and had ridden a dangerous hundred miles for nothing. Descending to
Horse Creek we forded it, and on the opposite bank a solitary Indian
sat on horseback under a tree. He said nothing, but turned and led
the way toward the camp. Bisonette had made choice of an admirable
position. The stream, with its thick growth of trees, inclosed on
three sides a wide green meadow, where about forty Dakota lodges were
pitched in a circle, and beyond them half a dozen lodges of the
friendly Cheyenne. Bisonette himself lived in the Indian manner.
Riding up to his lodge, we found him seated at the head of it,
surrounded by various appliances of comfort not common on the
prairie.
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