Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/346

 our scanty supplies. The Indians ate the buffalo liver raw, sometimes sprinkling a pinch of gall upon it; the warm raw liver alone is not bad for a hungry man, tasting very much like a raw oyster. The entrails are also much in favor with the aborigines; they are cleaned, wound round a ramrod, or something akin to it if a ramrod be not available, and held in the hot ashes until cooked through; they make a palatable dish; the buffalo has an intestine shaped like an apple, which is filled with chyle, and is the bonne bouche of the savages when prepared in the same manner as the other intestines, excepting that the contents are left untouched.

While riding alongside of one of our Crow scouts I noticed tears flowing down his cheeks, and very soon he started a wail or chant of the most lugubrious tone; I respected his grief until he had wept to his heart's content, and then ventured to ask the cause of such deep distress; he answered that his uncle had been killed a number of years before by the Sioux, and he was crying for him now and wishing that he might come back to life to get some of the ponies of the Sioux and Cheyennes. Two minutes after having discharged the sad duty of wailing for his dead relative, the young Crow was as lively as any one else in the column.

We bivouacked on the extreme head-waters of the Rosebud, which was at that point a feeble rivulet of snow water, sweet and palatable enough when the muddy ooze was not stirred up from the bottom. Wood was found in plenty for the slight wants of the command, which made small fires for a few moments to boil coffee, while the animals, pretty well tired out by the day's rough march of nearly forty miles, rolled and rolled again in the matted bunches of succulent pasturage growing at their feet. Our lines were formed in hollow square, animals inside, and each man sleeping with his saddle for a pillow and with arms by his side. Pickets were posted on the bluffs near camp, and, after making what collation we could, sleep was sought at the same moment the black clouds above us had begun to patter down rain. A party of scouts returned late at night, reporting having come across a small gulch in which was a still burning fire of a band of Sioux hunters, who in the precipitancy of their flight had left behind a blanket of India-rubber. We came near having a casualty in the accidental discharge of the revolver of