Rising Wolf, the White Blackfoot / Hugh Monroe's Story of His First Year on the Plains

by James Willard Schultz

Our next move was out to the point of the little spur of the mountains that is named Highwood. Its slopes were just alive with deer and elk, especially elk, and Red Crow and I killed two of them, big fat bulls, for a change of meat for our lodges. We did all the hunting for Lone Walker's big family; they required an awful lot of meat; of fresh meat about three pounds a day for each person, and each day there were also a number of guests to be fed. At a rough guess I put the amount that we used at three hundred pounds a day. Do you wonder that Red Crow and I, and Mink Woman helping us, were kept pretty busy?

Leaving the Highwood we moved out to Arrow River (Ap-si-is-i-sak-ta), and once more I felt that I was in country that white men had never seen. The Arrow River valley is for most of its course a deep, walled gash in the plains; there are long stretches of it where neither man nor any animal, except the bighorn, can climb its red rock cliffs. But the moment I first set eyes upon it, I liked it. I always did like cliffs, their ledges, and caves hiding one can never tell what mysteries. There were many bighorn along these cliffs, and mule deer were plentiful in all the rough breaks of the valley. Out on the plains endless herds of buffaloes and antelopes grazed, coming daily down steep and narrow, deep-worn trails to drink at the river; and in the valley itself every patch of timber fringing the stream sheltered white-tailed deer and elk. There were many beavers, pond beavers and bank beavers, along the stream. Bear tracks were everywhere to be seen, in the dusty game trails, and in the river shore sands.

We wound down into the deep canyon by following a well-worn game trail down a coulee several miles in length, and when we went into camp between a fine cottonwood grove and the stream, and Lone Walker said that we would remain there for some time, I was much pleased, for I wanted to do a lot of hunting and exploring along the cliffs with Red Crow.

We could not do it the next day, for we had to get meat for the two lodges. That was not difficult. With Mink Woman to help us, and leading six pack horses, we left very early in the morning and rode down the valley for four or five miles, examining the many game trails that came into the valley; there was one in every break, every coulee cutting the rock wall formation. We at last struck a well-worn trail that came into the valley through a gap in the cliff not twenty feet wide, and under a projecting rock shelf about ten feet high. We saw that we could climb onto the shelf, and shoot straight down at the game as it passed, so Red Crow rode up the trail to look out on the plain and learn if it would pay us to make our stand there. He was gone a long time, and when he returned said that a very large herd of buffaloes was out beyond the head of the coulee, and slowly grazing toward it; he thought that it would be coming in to water before noon. We therefore hid our horses in some timber below the mouth of the coulee, and then all three climbed up on the rock shelf and sat down. I held my gun ready, laid a pistol on either side of me, and Red Crow strung his bow and got out a handful of arrows.

It was hot there on that shelf. The sun blazed down upon us, and we could not have held out had not a light wind been blowing down the coulee. It was past noon when a most peculiar noise came to us with the wind; a deep, roaring noise like distant, but steady thunder. I asked what caused it.

"It is the bulls; the buffalo bulls are grunting because now is their mating season," Red Crow explained. "They now take wives. They are very mad; they fight one another, and night and day keep up that grunting."

The noise became louder and louder. "They come. They are coming now to drink," said Red Crow, and soon after that we saw the lead of the herd coming around a bend in the coulee. A number of bulls came first, heads down, and swaying as they walked with ponderous tread, and as they came nearer I saw that they were making that peculiar noise with their mouths closed, or all but closed. It was what I called a grunting bellow, very deep sounding, long sustained, a sound wholly unlike any other sound in the world. It was a sound that exactly fitted the animal that made it. As the buffalo's appearance was ever that of a forbidding, melancholy animal brooding over strange mysteries, so was its close-mouthed bellowing expressive of great sadness, and unfathomable mystery; of age-old mysteries that man can never penetrate. Often, as we gazed at bulls standing on some high point, and as motionless as though of stone, Indians have said to me: "They know! They know everything, they see everything! Nothing has been hidden from them from the time Old Man made the world and put them upon it!"

Perhaps so! Let us not be too sure that we are the only wise ones that roam this earth!