Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 V13.djvu/217

 related to me by our guide. A party of hunters in the morning missed one of their dogs from the encampment, and after a fruitless search were proceeding on their route, when one of the other dogs obtaining a scent, discovered to the hunters, dead beneath a tree, the dog which had strayed, together with a deer and a wolf in the same condition. {150} It appeared, that the panther, having killed a deer, and eat his fill, got into a tree to watch the remainder, and had, in his own defence, successively fallen upon the wolf and the dog as intruders on his provision.

19th.] This morning we set out late in consequence of the rain, which had continued throughout the night. We proceeded a little west of south, along the hills and prairies which divide the three principal branches of the Kiamesha, skirting the south side of the bare serrated hills already noticed scattered with pine and post-oak, in order to shorten the distance which we should have been obliged to make by keeping more into the level prairies. In this course we passed a number of little rivulets or torrents with rocky beds. The hills abounded with a kind of slaty petrosilex, which, as well as the slate-clay with which it alternates, appears destitute of organic remains. Some of the fragments were greenish, and appeared to be of the same character with the hone-slate of the Washita. At the junction of its three branches, the Kiamesha is hemmed in by very lofty ridges, partly covered with pine and oak. On one of the most conspicuous summits we had observed, for many miles, a beacon of the Osages, being a solitary tree fantastically trimmed like a broom. Our path now became difficult and obstructed by fallen rocks; that which we had pursued in the earlier part of the day was one of those, which, from time immemorial, had been trodden out by the bison. We still continued in a south