I well remember how warm and windless that March day was. There were patches of snow on the north side of the hills, and in the coulees, but otherwise the brown plains were bare and dry. The mountains, of course, were impassable, so we kept along the foot of them, traveling east, and that night camped at the foot of the Black Butte. The following morning we swung around the butte and headed south by a little east, a course that would take us to the junction of Elk River and the Bighorn, my companions said. We crossed the Musselshell River at noon or a little earlier, and that night slept upon the open plain. The weather continued fine. The next morning also broke clear and warm and cloudless. We started on at sunrise and, topping a ridge, Mad Plume pointed to some dark breaks away off to the south, and told me that they marked the course of Elk River. I estimated that we were about twenty miles from them.

At about ten o'clock we marked a big wedge of gray geese coming north, and Red Crow, pointing to them, exclaimed: "See the sun's messengers! He sends them north to tell us that he is coming to drive Cold Maker back to his always-winter land!"

He had no more than said that than the geese suddenly broke their well-ordered wedge lines and, shrilly honking, turned and went straight south on wild, uneven wings!

"Ha! They have seen Cold Maker coming! Yes! He is coming; I can smell him!" Mad Plume exclaimed, and brought his horse to a stand and looked to the north.

So did we, and saw a black belt of fog all across the horizon and right down upon the ground, and coming south with frightful speed. It had advanced as far as the north slope of the Snowy Mountains when we turned and saw it, and even as we looked they were lost in its blackness! The air suddenly became strong with the odor of burning grass. I had never seen anything like it. The swiftly moving, black fog bank, apparently turning over and over like a huge roller and blotting out the plain and mountains, frightened me, and I asked my companions what it meant.

"Fearful wind, cold, and snow! Cold Maker is bringing it! He hides himself in his black breath!" Red Crow told me.

"We have to ride hard! Unless we can get to the timber we are gone!" Mad Plume cried, and away we went as though we were trying to outride a big war party. And then suddenly that black fog bank struck us and instead of fog it was a terrific storm cloud! The wind all but tore us from our horses; fine, hard snow swirled and beat into our eyes, almost blinding us, and the air became bitterly cold. I marveled at the sudden change from sunny spring to a winter blizzard. Like my companions, I had on a pair of soft leather moccasins, and over them a pair of buffalo robe moccasins, and on my hands were robe mittens, but for all their thickness and warmth both hands and feet began to numb in the terrible cold of the storm.

Mad Plume led us, we following close in single file. In front of me, not ten feet away, Red Crow and his horse were but dim shadows in the driving snow. I saw him dismount and begin running beside his horse, and I got down and did likewise. And so, alternately on foot and riding we went on and on until it seemed to me that we had traveled thrice the distance to the river breaks that we had seen so plainly before the storm came up. At last Mad Plume stopped and we crowded around him. He had to shout to make himself heard. "What think you?" he asked. "Is the wind still from the north?"

We could not answer that. To me it seemed to be coming from all directions at once.

"If Cold Maker has changed it we are sure to become lost and die. If he still blows it south we should soon get to shelter," he said, and led on.

"We are lost!" I kept saying to myself as we ran, and rode, on and on for what seemed to me hours and hours, the snow at last becoming so deep that we were obliged to remain on our horses. But just as I felt that I was beginning to freeze, that there was no longer any use in trying to keep going, we began to descend a steep slope, and at the foot of it rode into a grove of big cottonwoods and out of the terrible wind! Mad Plume led us into a deep part of the woods where grew great clumps of tall willows, and we dismounted. "Ha! We survive! And now for comfort: a lodge, fire, food! Hobble your horses and get to work!" he cried.

I couldn't hobble mine, my hands were so numb that I could do nothing with them; so I ran around swinging them and clapping them together until they became warm. I then cared for my horse, and with good will helped my companions gather material, dry poles, dead branches, brush, and armfuls of tall rye grass for a small lodge. We soon had it up and a good fire going. The cold air rushed in through a thousand little spaces between the poles; we made a lodge lining of our pishimores—pieces of buffalo robe that we used for saddle blankets—and sat back on our rye grass couches and were truly comfortable, and very thankful that Cold Maker had not overcome us! Presently one of our horses nickered, and Red Crow went out to learn the cause of it. "A big herd of elk has come in!" he called to us, and we all ran out and followed him on their trail; they had passed within fifty yards of the lodge. We soon saw them standing in a thick patch of willows, heads down, and bodies all humped up with the cold. They paid no attention to our approach and we moved right up close to them and shot down four with bows and arrows. We skinned them all, taking the hides for more lodge covering, and cut a lot of meat from a fat, dry cow that I had killed, and then we were prepared to weather the storm, no matter how long it should last.

The terrible wind and snow lasted all that night and far into the afternoon of the following day, and when it ceased the weather remained piercingly cold. When the sun came out I took up my gun and went for a walk, and going through the timber looked out upon a great river, the Sieur de la VÉrendrie's La Roche Jaune, (the Yellowstone). He had seen it, where it merged with the Missouri, in 1744, and upon his return to Montreal told of the mighty flow of its waters from the snows of the Shining Mountains. How many times I had heard my grandfather and others speak of it, and even talk of an expedition to explore its vast solitudes to its source. They were sure that they would be well rewarded with furs. The very name of the river suggested riches; rich mines of gold and silver! And here I was, actually upon the shore of this great river of the West, looking out upon its frozen stretches, and in quest of neither furs nor gold, but of peace between two warring tribes! I said to myself that the Sieur de la VÉrendrie and his men, and Lewis and Clark and their men had seen the mouth of the river, but that mine was the honor of first seeing its upper reaches, and oh, how proud of that I was! I did not learn until long afterward that upon their return journey from the Western Ocean, a part of the Lewis and Clark expedition had struck across the plains to the river, and followed it down to the Missouri.

I returned to the lodge to find my companions roasting our evening meal of elk ribs, and was soon eating my large share of the fat meat. When that was over we made plans for continuing our journey. While I had been out at the river, Mad Plume had climbed to the rim of the plain for a look at the country, and found that we were not far above the mouth of the Bighorn.

Said Mad Plume now: "No matter how cold it is in the morning, we must start on. The colder it is the safer we will be, for we will not likely be discovered by the Crow hunters, and that is what I most fear, discovery of us while traveling, and sudden attack upon us. I think that if we can reach the edge of the camp without being seen, we can go on through it to the chief's lodge safely enough; the people will be so curious to know why we have come that they will not then fall upon us."

"We can travel nights and escape being seen," said Ancient Otter.

"But we can't cover up our tracks; this fall of snow will last for some days. Well, we will make an early start, and anyhow keep traveling in the daytime if we find it possible," Mad Plume decided, and started to talk about other matters.

After a time Ancient Otter said: "Our camping here reminds me of the time that we made peace with the Crows just below, at the mouth of the Bighorn, and the young Crow, Little Wolf, with whom I became very friendly. I wonder if he is still living? I did not see him when we had that fight, some moons back. If he is still alive I know that he will be with us for making peace. I must tell you about him:

"On the evening of the day that we made peace, he invited me to dance with him and his friends, and I had a pleasant time. A day or two after that I asked him to one of our dances. Then we visited often in his lodge and in mine, and we became close friends. One day he said to me, in signs, of course, the Crows are fine sign talkers, 'We are five young men going south on a raid; you get together four of your friends and join us.'

"Two or three days after that we started, five Crows and five of us, Little Wolf and I joint leaders of the party. We went on foot, traveling at night, taking our time; we had the whole summer before us. We followed up the Bighorn almost to its head, then crossed a wide, high ridge and struck a stream heading in several mountain canyons, and running east into the great plain. At the mouth of one of the canyons we discovered a big camp of the enemy. We came upon it unexpectedly, soon after daylight, and after crossing a wide, level stretch of plain. Looking down from the edge of the cliff we had come to, there was the camp right under us. People were already up and moving about, some of the men preparing to ride out to hunt. We dared not attempt to go back across the plain; there was but one thing for us to do; we wriggled down into a patch of cherry brush just below the top of the cliff and in a coulee that broke it, and felt safe enough except for the fact that the brush was heavy with ripe fruit; some women and children might come up to gather it.

"The cliff was broken down in many places, more a steep slope of boulders than a cliff, and it was not high. From where we sat in the brush the nearest lodges of the camp were no more than long bow shot from us. We could see the people plainly and hear them talking. They were the Spotted Horses People.[1]

"The lodge nearest us was very large, new, and evidently the lodge of a medicine man, for it was painted with figures of two long snakes with plumes on their heads. A number of women lived in it; they kept coming out and going back, but their man never once appeared.

"The horses of the camp were grazing in the valley of the stream both above and below it and we looked at them with longing, for we could see that many of them were of the spotted breed. After a time a boy on a big, dancing, spotted stallion drove a large band of horses up in front of the snake medicine lodge and then the medicine man came out to look at them. He was a very tall and heavily built man. He wore a cow leather wrap, medicine painted. My Crow friend nudged me, pointed to the big stallion and then signed to me: 'I shall take that horse to-night, and others with him!'

"I laughed, and signed back, 'You don't know that for sure. I may be the one to seize him!'

"The medicine man was talking to the boy on the stallion, louder and louder until his voice became like the roar of a wounded bear in our ears. He suddenly reached up and seized the boy by the arm, dragged him from the stallion, and then picking up a big stick began to beat him with it. We groaned at the awful sight; almost we cried out at it, we who never strike our sons. The women had come out of the lodge; they were crying, no doubt begging the man to let the boy go, but he paid no attention to them, nor to the crowd of people hurrying toward him from all parts of the camp. He beat and beat the boy, at last struck him on the head and he fell as though dead; and at that the women ran forward and lifted him and hurried him into a near-by lodge. The man watched them go, then took up his fallen wrap and went into his lodge. Said my Crow friend to me, in signs, 'We must make that man pay big for beating the boy. He shall lose his horses, all of them, and his medicine, too!'

"'Yes! Let us, you and I, take all his horses, and our men take others as they will. But his medicine, no, not that; it would bring us bad luck,' I answered.

"All that long, hot day, thirsty, hungry, we sat there in the patch of cliff brush watching the enemy camp and its horse herds. We saw nothing more of the beaten boy, and the medicine man did not appear again until nearly sunset. He then went down the valley to his herd, which had been allowed to graze back to its feeding ground, and caught out of it the stallion, rode it home and picketed it close to his lodge. Other men brought in one or two of their horses for early morning use. The sun set. The moon came up. We climbed back to the top of the cliff, went along it for some distance, and then down into the valley below the camp to water. There, where we struck the river, was to be our meeting place. After a long wait we scattered out, Little Wolf and I going together after the medicine man's herd. We had kept constant watch on it, and now went straight to it and drove it to the meeting place. Some of our companions were already there with their takings. We left the herd for them to hold, and struck out for the camp to get the big stallion. On the way up my friend again told me that he would take the medicine. I tried to get him to leave it alone, but his mind was set; the loss of the medicine, he said, should be the man's punishment for beating the boy.

"The lodge fires had all died out and the people were asleep when we arrived at the edge of the camp. We kept close to the foot of the cliff and approached the medicine man's lodge. The stallion was picketed between it and the cliff. Little Wolf signed to me to go to it and wait for him while he took the medicine, which we could see was still hanging on a tripod just back of the lodge. Again I signed him not to take it. I laid hold of his arm and tried to lead him with me toward the horse, but he signed that he would have the medicine and I let him go, and went on toward the horse.

"I don't know why I changed my course and followed my friend; something urged me to do so. I was about twenty steps behind him as he went up to the tripod and started to lift the medicine sacks from it. As he did so I saw the lodge skin suddenly raised and the medicine man sprang out from under it and seized him from behind. I ran to them as they struggled and struck the big man on the head with my gun and down he went and lay still. He had never seen me, and never knew what hit him. Neither had he made any outcry. As soon as he fell we ran to the stallion, bridled him with his picket rope and sprang upon his back, Little Wolf behind me, and still hanging to the medicine sacks. It was my intention to make the stallion carry us out from the camp as fast as he could go, but there was nowhere any outcry—any one in sight, so I let him go at a walk until we were some distance down the valley, and then hurried him the rest of the way to the meeting place. Our companions were all there with their takings, mounted and waiting for us. Little Wolf got down and caught a horse and away we went for the north, and it was a big band of horses that we drove ahead of us.

"At daybreak we stopped to change to fresh horses, and as I turned loose the stallion I signed to Little Wolf: 'There! Take your horse!'

"'I shall never put a rope on him! You saved my life; that enemy would have killed me but for you. The horse is yours,' he signed back, and went away off our trail and hung the medicine sacks in the brush where any pursuers we might have would never see them. He gave them to the sun.

"Well, when we got back to the mouth of the Bighorn we found that the Pi-kun-i had started for the Snow Mountains several days before, so after one night in the Crow camp we five took up their trail. I spent that last night in Little Wolf's lodge, and we planned to meet often again, and to go on more raids together. His last words, or signs, rather, to me were: 'Do not forget that no matter what others may do, you and I shall always be friends!'

"'Yes! Friends always,' I answered, and rode away. I have never seen him since that time."

So ended Ancient Otter's story. It heartened me. If his friend was still alive—and he certainly had not been killed in the big fight—he would be with us for making peace, as well as Mad Plume's sister. Said Mad Plume to me: "You now know why Ancient Otter is with us. He told the story to you; we knew it!"

The next morning broke very cold; the air was full of fine frost flakes; the snow was drifted and in places very deep. We unhobbled our horses, saddled them and struck off through the timber toward the mouth of the Bighorn soon after sunrise. An hour or so later we crossed the river on the ice, and turned up the valley of the Bighorn. Here I again said to myself that I was traversing country that people of my race had never seen, but I was mistaken. I learned years afterward that a Lewis and Clark man, named Cotter, had come west again in 1807, and had trapped on the headwaters of the Bighorn, and followed it down to its junction with the Yellowstone.

We saw great numbers of the different kinds of game that morning, and the sight that most impressed me was the trees full of grouse, or prairie chickens, as the whites call them. We passed hundreds of cottonwoods in which the birds were almost as plentiful as apples in an apple tree. They sat motionless upon their perches, their feathers all fluffed out, and paid not the slightest attention to us as we passed under them.

"They are cold and unhappy now, but in the next moon they will be dancing, and happy enough," Red Crow said to me. He saw that I thought he was joking, and went on: "Yes, dancing! They gather in a circle on the plain and the males dance and the females look on. Oh, they have just as good times dancing as we do."

He was right. Many a time since then I have stopped and watched the birds dance for a long time. It is a very interesting sight. After the long years I have passed in the plains and mountains, studying the habits of all wild creatures, I become impatient when I hear people speak of them as dumb creatures. Dumb! Why, they have their racial languages as well as we! If they hadn't, do you think, for instance, that the grouse could have learned their peculiar dance? Or the beavers how to build their wonderful dams and houses?

The snow was so deep that we made no more than fifteen miles that day. We hobbled the tired horses long before sunset, and put up another war lodge and made ourselves as comfortable as was possible. We had seen no signs of the Crows during the day.

It was the next afternoon that we sighted them, or rather, one rider turning down into the valley from the plain, and several miles ahead of us. We happened at the time to be in the upper end of a long grove, and, while we could see him plainly, we were sure that the trees screened us from him, bare though they were.

"The sun is almost down, he rides as if he were in no hurry; I think that the camp cannot be far away," said Ancient Otter.

"Ai! That is my thought," Mad Plume agreed, and led on, the rider having passed from our sight around a bend in the valley. We crossed a strip of open bottom, entered another grove which circled clear around the bend, and presently, looking out from the upper end of it, saw the great camp. It was pitched in a wide, open bottom about a mile from us and was in two sections, or circles, one, of course, that of the River Crows, the other the Mountain Crows. Looking out upon them, and the swarms of people passing in all directions among the lodges, I shivered a bit. Not until that moment had I been even doubtful of the success of our mission. Now a great fear came over me. Many of those people I saw were mourning for the loss of some dear one in the attack upon us some months back. I doubted that they would ever give us time to state the reason of our coming; they would kill us as soon as they saw that we were the hated Pi-kun-i! And then, to add to my fear, Mad Plume turned to Ancient Otter and asked: "Brother, which one, think you, is the camp of the Mountain Crows?"

"I can't make out for sure, but I think it is the first one. We have to make sure of that. If we enter the camp of the River Crows we shall find no one there to help us; right there will be our end!"

"Your sister and Little Wolf are in the Mountain Crow camp?" I asked Mad Plume.

"Yes!" he answered, very shortly, and continued staring thoughtfully at the camps.

Said Ancient Otter: "Oh, if we could only be a little nearer to the lodges, I could tell. Little Wolf's lodge is on the west side of the camp circle, and right next it, the first one to the south, is a lodge painted with two wolves. The Crow wolf medicine."

"Yes, I remember that lodge. It is five lodges north of my sister's lodge," said Mad Plume.

"Well, one thing we can do! Unless we freeze to death!" Mad Plume went on. "We can stay right here until night, then sneak into camp and find my sister and your friend and get them to help us, to protect us until we are in the chief's lodge."

We all agreed that that was the only thing to do, and began our chilly wait. Red Crow pointed to the many bands of horses grazing between the camp and us, and on both slopes of the valley. "What a chance for us if we were raiders!" he exclaimed.

"Don't talk foolishness at this time!" Mad Plume told him. "It is best that you pray the gods for help in what we are about to undertake!" And with that he voiced a short, earnest prayer to the sun, to Old Man, and his own medicine animal—"thou little under water animal"—he called it, to preserve us from all the dangers that we were to face there in the enemy camp. And when he had finished I cried out even as the others did: "Ai! Spuhts-uh Mut-tup-i, kim-o-ket-an-nan!" (Yes! Above People, pity have for us!)

Hai! Hai! But it was cold! Our horses stood humped up and miserable, the sweat freezing on their hair.

"We have to hobble them and turn them loose to graze, else they will freeze to death," said Mad Plume.

"Yes, we may as well do that. If all goes well with us we shall find them safe enough hereabout, and if we never come back for them, why, they will live anyhow!" said Ancient Otter. So we turned them out, and set our saddles and ropes and pishimores in a little pile, and stamped about and swung our arms trying to keep warm.

Oh, how slowly, and yet how fast the sun went down that evening. But down it went at last, and as soon as the valley was really dark we started for the camp. As we neared it Mad Plume's last words were: "Remember this: You are to expect abuse and you are to stand it until you see that there is no hope for us. Then, die fighting!"

Cheering words, weren't they!