Page:The Conquest.djvu/197



"I must have an antelope," said Lewis.

At that moment he saw seven on a hilltop. Creeping carefully near, they scented him on the wind. The wild beauties were gone, and a similar flock of seven appeared on a neighbouring height.

"Can they have spanned the ravine in this brief time?"

He looked, and lo! on a third height and then a fourth they skimmed the hills like cloud shadows, or winged griffins of the fabled time, half quadruped and half bird.

"A cur'ous lill animal here, Captain," said one of the hunters, handing him a limp little body. Its head was like a squirrel's. Lewis stroked the long fine hair.

"What is it?"

Cruzatte, the bowman, paddle in hand, leaned over, peering with his one near-sighted but intelligent eye.

"Ha! ha! ha! le petit chien!" he laughed. "Live in te hole een te prairie. Leetle dog. Bark, yelp, yelp, yelp, like te squirrel. All over te countree, whole towns," spreading his brown hands expressively.

After this lucid explanation the Captains, Lewis and Clark, set out for a prairie-dog town. A few yelps, heels in air, the town was deserted save for the tiny mounds that told where each had hidden.

"Let us drown one out."

Forthwith, every man came puffing up with big brass kettles full of water.

"Five barrels," says Clark in his journal, "were poured into the holes but not a dog came out," and Patrick Gass adds, "Though they worked at the business until night they only caught one of them."

More and more the hills were thronged with buffalo. Even York, Captain Clark's black servant, went out and killed two at one ride.

On the top of a high bluff the men had found the skeleton of a huge fish, forty-five feet long and petrified.

George Shannon, the boy of the expedition, had enlivened many a sunrise with his jolly, rollicking Irish songs.