And so, the first part of our route was settled without much difficulty.
Next morning we broke up camp, and after a few days of hard travelling, struck the south fork of the Colorado. Game had been scarcer than we had supposed. However, it was absolutely necessary that we should here replenish our stock of provisions. The jerked meat began to run low, and we had no more than a single day's rations of coffee on hand. A halt for a few days was therefore proposed, during which we might devote our time to hunting, and laying in sufficient meat for us to continue our route to the East.
On the second morning after we had camped, I started alone up the river.
After ascending it for some three or four miles, I crossed and broke from it towards the south. In a brief space of time, I spotted an antelope, and was creeping up to it, against the wind, when almost close to me, beneath a large rock which had hitherto concealed it, I caught sight of another. My rifle was in a moment at my shoulder, and with no more trouble than it takes in telling it, I rolled him over.
This had occurred in the afternoon, and as I should have to carry the animal back with me, I thought it might be as well to retrace my steps.
Tying its feet together, I accordingly slung the dead antelope upon my back and started on my return.
The side of the Colorado in which our camp had been pitched, swept down to its banks with a park-like slope, although its herbage and the trees with which it was broken up, were wilder and more luxuriant than such a qualifying epithet might lead the reader to suppose they were. On the side to which I had crossed, the stream was bounded by an almost perpendicular wall of cliff, about sixty or seventy feet in height. Calculating that I should readily find some spot at which to descend, I had taken my way almost in a beeline to the spot opposite our camping-ground. Scarcely had I covered more than a mile in this direction than, happening to turn my head to the left, I saw a number of red-skins rushing towards me.
So thoroughly unmolested had our party been by Indians, since we had left Belmont, that I had entirely forgotten Arnold's warning hint about their presence in this part of the country. Indeed, I had not even thought about them lately, so apparently secure from their presence did we seem to be.
Here, however, they were, and plenty of them. Dropping the antelope in order to save myself, I took to my heels.