Page:The Oregon Trail by Parkman.djvu/213

Rh But as Raymond's bourgeois thought otherwise, we descended the hill and began to cross the plain. We had come so far that I knew perfectly well neither Pauline's limbs nor my own could carry me back to Fort Laramie. I considered that the lines of expediency and inclination tallied exactly, and that the most prudent course was to keep forward. The ground immediately around us was thickly strewn with the skulls and bones of buffalo, for here a year or two before the Indians had made a "surround;" yet no living game was in sight. At length an antelope sprang up and gazed at us. We fired together, and b both missed, although the animal stood, a fair mark, within eighty yards. This ill-success might perhaps be charged to our own eagerness, for by this time we had no provision left except a little flour. We could see several pools of water glistening in the distance. As we approached, wolves and antelopes bounded away through the tall grass that around them, and flocks of large white plover flew screaming over their surface. Having failed of the antelope, Raymond tried his hand at the birds with the same ill-success. The water also disappointed us. Its margin was so beaten up by the crowd of buffalo that our timorous animals were afraid to approach. So we turned away and moved toward the hills. The rank grass, where it was not trampled down by the buffalo, fairly swept our horses' necks.

Again we found the same execrable barren prairie offering no clew by which to guide our way. As we drew near the hills, an opening appeared, through which the Indians must have gone if they had passed that way at all. Slowly we began to ascend it. I felt the most dreary forebodings of ill-success, when on looking round I could discover neither dent of hoof, nor footprint, nor trace of lodge-pole, though the passage was encumbered