The feeling that gnawed my stomach was something more than mere hunger, and urged by its raging pangs I took with eagerness what would otherwise have been to me a nauseous compound. Strange as it may appear, it really was palatable, and what was still more important, it was nourishing and sustaining. While half of the contents of the tin yet remained, I handed it to the Indian, and our supper was soon over.
Strange shifts are those the red man learns in order to sustain his life amid the perils of the wilderness. Many of these shifts I had been taught in the past year, but none so strange as this one.
“See,” said the Sioux, when the scanty meal was finished, “the white man would have killed his horse when hunger had come upon him; he would have lived for three days, or four, and then he would have died. On these two horses we can live, if necessary, for many days, and they will still carry us along our way.”
At dawn next morning we were astir.
The Sioux ascended the hill at once. I remained in the camp. It was yet indistinct light, and the eye failed for a time to reach even midway across the vast field of vision that lay around. But at length the reddening eastern sky cast its reflection deeper into the west, and pierced the prairie in every direction. Suddenly the Sioux waved his hand, and shouted a wild whoop of triumph! The buffalo were in sight!
Far off and faint, dwarfed down by distance to mere dark specks, they dotted the horizon to the south-west, and spread nearer into the scene in atoms that were ever growing more distinct.
I was quickly at his side. Well indeed might the Indian have called his war-note. The sight would have been one to call forth no scant measure of enthusiasm, even had it been looked upon by men whose minds had not been strung by hunger to most anxious intensity, for in itself it was a glorious prospect.
Upon this vast silent plain had come, during the dark hours, a mighty invasion. The frontier of the horizon had been passed; the columns had spread out like some great fan-shaped cloud, and where the evening sun had gone down over a landscape lonely and untenanted, the glory of the morning beams had come flushing up upon the myriad surges of that wild animal life which, in size, majesty, and numbers, stands all unequalled over the earth.
“How far are they away?” I asked, after I had for some moments gazed upon this grand scene.