Yes, it is pleasant work that daily routine of prairie travel—work that brings to the heart of man as much of the simple satisfaction that exists in breathing, seeing, living, as can perhaps be found the whole earth over.
Over such a scene we now held our way, and evening found us camped by a tiny lake many miles from the starting-point.
The next day and the next day beheld us still holding south. But a change had gradually crept over the landscape. The thickets had become few, the lakelets scarce. Long stretches of unbroken plain lay before us, and, rolling away to east and west, the same treeless and yellow grassy hills spread out to the farthest verge of vision.
But there were no buffalo to be seen. Far and near the eye of the Sioux scanned in vain for a trace of those dark specks so welcome to the hunter’s sight—those moving specks, so infinitely small on the horizon, so impressive in the nearer distance, that tell him the great herds are at hand.
The fourth day had arrived, the last day for which food had been brought. More than 100 miles had been travelled, and yet not one trace of buffalo was visible on any side. From the evening camp that day we made a long survey of the plains. A ridge higher than its neighbours gave us a far extending view over the prairies, and as we stood upon its summit while the sun was nearing the western horizon, vast indeed was the scene that lay within the compass of a single glance. If ever the mere fact of space can be thoroughly realized by man on earth, instantly embodied as it were in a single sweep of vision, brought home to the mind by the simple process of sight, it is when the eye sweeps over such a scene as this upon which we now looked. Not a cloud obscured it; no mist arose from stream or river; no blur of smoke crossed its immense depth. To the west, all was brilliant colour; to the east, the pale tints of the coming night were faintly visible above the horizon.
A grand sight surely! but one, nevertheless, upon which we now looked with a keen sense of disappointment; for all this scene of lonely distance held in its vast area no hope of food.
Still the Sioux was determined to hold his course further out into the waste.
“For two days more,” he said, as we finished the last bit of pemmican in a hollow beneath the hill from which our survey had been made—“for two days we will journey on to the south.”
“And then,” I inquired, “if we should not fall in with buffalo what will you do?”
“And then,” said the Sioux, “I will show you how we still can live and still can travel.”