Fresh meat I missed very much, though the few jack-rabbits I got helped out, and were good eating, as I have said, and smelled as good as anything could while cooking. Some other fresh meat I had also, as you shall see directly. Once I made up my mind to have some chicken. There was one hen who was very fat and never, I was sure, laid an egg. I took the hatchet, which was sharp enough, and went to the barn, intending to behead her, having it all planned how I should cook her for my Sunday dinner. When I got to the barn the hen seemed to know what I intended, and she looked at me with one eye, very reproachful, and I went back to the house with my hatchet and never made any more plans for fried chicken.
There was much bad weather in January. Often I noticed that this was the way of it: It would snow for one day, blizzard for three, and then for two be still, steady, bitter cold. On these latter the thermometer would often go 125 over forty degrees below zero, with the sun shining bright and the sky blue; but with a frightful big yellow-and-orange sun-dog each side of the sun, morning and evening, like two great columns; and sometimes there would be a big orange circle around the sun all day, with much frost in the air.
Some of the nights were light, almost, as day with the northern lights flaming up from behind Frenchman’s Butte all over the whole sky, and all colors and shapes. On these nights the horses (they had been wild ponies once) would stamp about in the barn, and Kaiser would growl in his sleep. When I rubbed the cat’s back it would crack and sparkle. The wolves seemed to howl more and differently on these nights, and once I went to the station, thinking the fire there needed fixing, and I heard the telegraph instrument clicking fit to tear itself to pieces. Often the next day after the northern lights would come the storm.
It was on the very day that I had said to Kaiser and Pawsy at breakfast (that is, January 25th) that it was a month since I had seen any human being, that I was at the depot after 126 a load of ground feed, and in looking to the northwest thought I saw something moving. It did not take me long to go up the windmill tower. It was not past ten o’clock in the forenoon, so the light for looking toward the northwest was good, though of course, as the sun was shining, the snow was pretty dazzling. But I could still only make out that something was moving south or southwest. It was impossible to tell if it were men or horses or cattle. So I went down as fast as I could, jumped onto the sled, and the next minute Kaiser had me at the hotel, where I got the field-glass and went back.
Up the tower I scrambled for another look. The snow was so dazzling that the glass did less good than you might suppose, but with it I could soon tell that it was a party of men on horseback following either another party or a drove of cattle or horses. The band ahead swung gradually about and came toward Track’s End. The ones behind seemed to be trying to cut them off, but they failed to do it. On they came, and in ten minutes I could see that it was either cattle or horses that were being chased by twenty or twenty-five men on 127 horseback. The cattle were following a low, broad ridge where the snow was less deep, and which spread out west of the town, making less snow there also, as I have mentioned before. I thought there was something peculiar about the riding of the men; I watched closely, and then I saw they were Indians.
My first thought was that it was daylight and no jack-lantern would scare them away. I saw I must depend on harsher measures. In almost no time I had got over town, locked the barn, shut Kaiser in the hotel, run through my tunnel to the bank so as to be on the west side of town, and stood peeping out a loophole with two fully loaded Winchesters on a table beside me.