Tete Rouge had taken
his place at dinner; it was his happiest moment; he sat enveloped in
the old buffalo coat, sleeves turned up in preparation for the work,
and his short legs crossed on the grass before him; he had a cup of
coffee by his side and his knife ready in his hand and while he
looked upon the fat hump ribs, his eyes dilated with anticipation.
Delorier sat just opposite to him, and the rest of us by this time
had taken our seats.
"How is this, Delorier? You haven't given us bread enough."
At this Delorier's placid face flew instantly into a paroxysm of
contortions. He grinned with wrath, chattered, gesticulated, and
hurled forth a volley of incoherent words in broken English at the
astonished Tete Rouge. It was just possible to make out that he was
accusing him of having stolen and eaten four large cakes which had
been laid by for dinner. Tete Rouge, utterly confounded at this
sudden attack, stared at Delorier for a moment in dumb amazement,
with mouth and eyes wide open. At last he found speech, and
protested that the accusation was false; and that he could not
conceive how he had offended Mr. Delorier, or provoked him to use
such ungentlemanly expressions. The tempest of words raged with such
fury that nothing else could be heard. But Tete Rouge, from his
greater command of English, had a manifest advantage over Delorier,
who after sputtering and grimacing for a while, found his words quite
inadequate to the expression of his wrath. He jumped up and
vanished, jerking out between his teeth one furious sacre enfant de
grace, a Canadian title of honor, made doubly emphatic by being
usually applied together with a cut of the whip to refractory mules
and horses.
The next morning we saw an old buffalo escorting his cow with two
small calves over the prairie. Close behind came four or five large
white wolves, sneaking stealthily through the long meadow-grass, and
watching for the moment when one of the children should chance to lag
behind his parents. The old bull kept well on his guard, and faced
about now and then to keep the prowling ruffians at a distance.
As we approached our nooning place, we saw five or six buffalo
standing at the very summit of a tall bluff. Trotting forward to the
spot where we meant to stop, I flung off my saddle and turned my
horse loose. By making a circuit under cover of some rising ground,
I reached the foot of the bluff unnoticed, and climbed up its steep
side. Lying under the brow of the declivity, I prepared to fire at
the buffalo, who stood on the flat surface about not five yards
distant.
