“Where are they goin’, do you suppose?” asked Phil. “Huntin’?”
“Probably to the nearest town to attend the ten-cent picture show,” said Sam. “Their huntin’ days are over. Them Injuns can buy beef.”
It was Frank’s and Phil’s first sight of Indian land.
“This is too flat and treeless for huntin’ along here, isn’t it?” was Frank’s next question.
“The kind o’ huntin’ we do now ain’t the kind we used to do,” answered Sam recharging his pipe. “This is old buffalo ground and the best in the west in its day. My folks was English,” went on Skinner reminiscently, “and they came out to the Assinniboine River Valley in Canada when I was a baby. But from the time I was old enough to help in camp I can remember the buffalo hunts each fall. All them settlers—maybe several hundred—would trail for weeks to get down here near the Missouri River. But it wasn’t huntin’—it was the kind o’ work they do now in slaughter houses. We’d line up and march against them buffaloes like soldiers; and we had officers, too, to see that every one done his work. When the bugle blew, killin’ stopped for the day and all hands turned in to take care o’ the meat and the hides. And that went on sometimes for a month—the settlers followin’ the buffaloes till our wagons were full.”
“Full of what?” asked Phil innocently.
“My boy,” went on Sam, “them buffaloes was our winter’s provisions. Part of the meat was smoked or ‘jerked’ as we called it; the rest of it was ground up with the fat to make pemmican—that’s the way we used most of it—and the hides had to be cured. They was our profit, for even then we shipped ’em by the thousand to England. When the hunt was over we made the long march back to the Assinniboine. There’s buffalo yet,” he continued thoughtfully, “but not around here. Up on the Mackenzie River, nearer the Arctic Ocean than these prairies, there’s a few hundred animals that you might call buffaloes, but they ain’t the old prairie bull with a hump higher’n a man and wicked little eyes snappin’ out from a head hangin’ most on the ground. But,” continued Mr. Skinner, “buffaloes is buffaloes and I ain’t never goin’ to be satisfied till I’ve taken Mr. Mackworth up there on the Mackenzie. Huntin’ sheep with a spyglass may be sport all right but, for me, give me a good pony and the trail of a buffalo and I’ll be ready to quit.”
And this was only a sample of Sam Skinner’s talk all day. At breakfast and later as the train passed out of the Fort Peck reservation, he reeled off tales of the wonders of the Bear Paw Mountains to the south; the Sweet Grass big game country to the north. Lord Pelton and Captain Ludington were as curious about this as the inexperienced boys. But, at seven o’clock that evening, hunting and Indian tales came to a temporary end; the train, as if approaching a stone wall, thundered up to Midvale—the town at the foot of the main range of the Rocky Mountains.