450 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Sept. 19, 1908. 
no innocent person having suffered for our mis¬ 
deed, my guide and I, with schoolboy spirits, 
went after caribou—and such going as it was! 
Rain fell in torrents, and when not sliding off 
slippery logs or wading through a morass, we 
stood beneath dripping trees with feet deep in 
soggy moss, watching grassy lakes where the 
animals sometimes fed, while those more sensi¬ 
ble creatures were no doubt seeking shelter from 
the storm upon the firmer ground of the hard¬ 
wood ridges. Wet scarcely described our con¬ 
dition when we reached camp that evening, but 
the verbal explosion that met us at the threshold 
promptly diverted our minds from our discom¬ 
fort. 
“I have not often seen a man as angry as 
my friend was when he bellowed that because 
I had deceived him he had spent the entire day 
in his canoe despite the drenching rain, beating 
the water of the most deserted and the wettest 
lake he had ever had the misfortune to come 
up with; but finally he had discovered our tracks 
on the shore, and my perfidy had thereby been 
laid bare. His tirade was so vehement and per¬ 
sistent that I could not succeed in explaining 
that my reason for silence as to how and where 
I took the fish, was because I was ashamed of 
my method, and so he fumed and roared while 
his guide glared at mine as though bent upon 
having his gore. Maybe it was unfortunate that 
the whole affair seemed so humorous to me as 
to make my laughter uncontrollable, because my 
merriment incited him to further comment and, 
oh the other hand, maybe it was not unfortu- 
At a time when certain parts of America were 
peopled chiefly by wild animals and by men. 
who in their lives were almost as simple and 
natural as wild animals, things frequently hap¬ 
pened which to the men of to-day seem odd, 
extraordinary and hardly to be believed. 
The wild Indian and the old-time plainsman 
and mountaineer were close observers. Few of 
the operations of nature that went on before 
them escaped their notice, and, while the de¬ 
ductions that they drew from what they saw 
may not always have been logical or just, yet 
they overlooked very little of what happened. 
The man who spends some time in an Indian 
camp, not as a stranger, but as a friend, and 
who listens to the talk of friends whose memory 
goes back fifty or sixty years, is likely to find in 
his note book not a few of these extraordinary 
stories. Many of these surprise him less be¬ 
cause they are strange and unnatural than be¬ 
cause they deal with events which are entirely 
outside of the range of the experience of civil¬ 
ized man. I have set down some of these: 
I.—Marks Reached by Unaimed Arrows. 
I shot an arrow into the air, 
It fell to earth I knew not where; 
Forty years ago there lived in the Southwest 
a Comanche chief named Shaved Head, a man 
of great ability and of much influence with his 
people. He was a faithful friend of the white 
people and especially devoted to Colonel William 
Bent, the builder and proprietor of Bent’s old 
nate after all, for the reason that I did not lose 
my temper over his remarks even though most 
of them were uncalled for and puerile. 
“Finally, when the subject seemed worn thread¬ 
bare, I suggested that he now keep quiet while 
I said a few things, and then I informed him 
that he had not worked one-half as hard as I 
had on that dismal day, nor had he experienced 
worse luck. He was within gun shot of camp 
all the time and if he elected to sit in the canoe 
while rain fell and to cast flies where there 
were no rises, in preference to sitting in the tent, 
I did not think I was accountable. Well, an 
armed truce ensued, but he thought I had tricked, 
imposed upon and made a fool of him and I 
thought him a full fledged mollycoddle, so our 
intercourse during the homeward march was 
very limited and our pleasure was much abridged 
to be sure. 
“To sum up the case, as a lawyer would say, 
I think my testimony is strongly favorable to 
your plans of playing a lone hand, and I also 
think that your law of barter and exchange 
would have no bearing upon a case like this 
one.” 
My guest disappeared in the mist of the early 
morning, and although he had my good will, 
still it was a great pleasure, I distinctly remem¬ 
ber, to return to solitude and silence which to 
me seemed an integral part of the great forest. 
Possibly his agitation of mind and restlessness 
of body were due to his recent irritation, but as 
I knew him he could never become a bosom 
friend or confidant of old Dame Nature. 
fort on the Arkansas, of which all students of 
Western history have heard so much. 
Shaved Head was so named from the peculiar 
fashion in which he dressed his hair. On one 
side of the head the hair was shaved close to 
the skin, while on the other it grew naturally 
and hung down to his waist. The cartilage along 
the upper margin of the uncovered ear was 
pierced by many holes made with a blunt awl 
heated red hot, and in these holes were orna¬ 
ments of brass wire. 
In the year 1873 , when Shaved Head was prob¬ 
ably somewhat more than fifty years old, he 
related to George Bent, son of Colonel William 
Bent, an incident which occurred to a Comanche 
war party which he had accompanied as a young 
man. This was his story: 
A considerable war party of Comanches 
had come as far north as the North Fork of 
the Canadian River and turned down that 
stream. One night they camped in the timber, 
choosing a place where the bottom was narrow 
under a high bluff, on the side of which many 
trees grew. They had built their war house of 
bent willow twigs, closed toward the bluff and 
open toward the river, and in front of this their 
war ponies were tied. The saddles were placed 
at the back of this war house, at the sleepers’ 
heads, and the front being open, anyone who 
awoke during the night could look out and see 
the horses. 
During the evening, as they were sitting there 
roasting ribs, eating and talking, a great horned 
owl flew into one of the large trees immediately 
above the camp and began to call. He remained 
there for some time and was quite noisy, and 
more or less annoyed the Comanches. Finally 
one of them said, “We ought to frighten that 
bird away.” Then turning to a young man, one 
of the servants, he said to him, “Go and get 
your arrow and shoot at that bird, and see if 
you cannot kill if or scare it away. Notice well 
the direction in which you are shooting and to¬ 
morrow when day comes you can go and re¬ 
cover your arrow. Take care and shoot in the 
direction of the bluff so that the arrow will not 
fall back and hit any of the horses.” 
The boy got his bow, and after working 
around for a little while, got to a place where 
he could see the bird against the sky, and shoot¬ 
ing from which his arrow would go out and 
fall on the prairie above. He shot two or three 
times at the bird, and at length it flew away. He 
returned to the fire and soon afterward they all 
went to bed. 
Next morning befpre daylight the young man 
got up and started the fire and then went around 
and climbed the bluff to look for his arrows. 
On top of the bluff and close to its edge, about 
where the arrows should have gone, was a little 
bunch of dogwood sprouts, and close by the 
dogwoods passed a trail where the buffalo had 
come along and gone down the face of the bluff 
to get to the river. The boy went to the dog¬ 
woods to look among them for his arrows and 
as he crossed the buffalo trail he saw in it fresh 
moccasin tracks, but he could see no people and 
went on. When he got among the dogwoods 
looking for his arrow, he saw first much blood 
spilt upon the ground, and then, a little further 
on, the dead body of a big Osage warrior lying 
there with the boy’s arrow sticking in him. The 
arrow had entered close to his neck just behind the 
collar bone and had gone straight down into his 
body, so far that only the feathers were sticking 
out. The man must have died almost at once. 
He had been sitting there on the edge of the 
bluff looking over at the party of Comanches, 
with whom the Osages were then at war, 
and the boy’s arrow shot at the owl had come 
down upon him from above and pierced his 
heart. 
This story of the mark found by an unaimed 
arrow is almost paralleled by another occurrence 
which took - place among the Sioux, perhaps a 
little later. 
The Sioux had been chasing buffalo north of 
the Platte River, and now all about over the 
prairie were lying dead buffalo that had been 
shot with arrows. Some of them were being 
skinned by their owners and others the owners 
had not yet found. Each man, when he came 
to a buffalo, looked at the arrow which remained 
in it to see whether it belonged to him or not, 
for each man’s arrow bore his own private 
mark. 
Among the Sioux was a man who for some 
reason had not been successful in killing buffalo. 
He came to a fat cow lying on the prairie, 
and seeing no one near he determined to steal 
it. He dismounted and drew out the arrow 
which had killed the cow, and not knowing how 
else to get rid of the arrow he put it on the 
string of his bow and turned around and shot 
it in the air over his left shoulder, supposing 
that it would fly off over the prairie and be lost. 
Indian Camp-Fire Tales 
