ic ground. We picketed our tired
horses, piled our packs under a cottonwood tree, and were soon trying to
unravel the mysteries of an extinct race. Strange to say no horses were
visible on the great calendar of rocks, but men, women, children, and
hieroglyphics were crowded on all available places that one could get to
register some fact or fancy of this tribe.

[Illustration: SHEEP EATERS PASS TO THE HOLY SHRINE]

CHAPTER V

A TALK WITH LITTLE BEAR

The term Paint Rocks will convey various meanings to the average reader.
A description seems in order to make more plain what these rocks are
like.

Just imagine a stream of clear, pure water running through a canyon,
small and narrow, with a smooth-surfaced rock face, cut by the water
when the earth and stone were young and tender, on which one could
write as on a black-board in a school room. Here the Sheep Eaters
came to record their history. Here father and son came to write the
traditions of their tribe; and here came that old squaw, whose name
in her own tribe, as translated by the Crow chief, Pretty Eagle, was,
"Under-The-Ground." Emblems, original with their tribe, were cut with
the obsidian arrowhead in irregular semicircles. The outlines of men
and women were about three feet in height. In some places the storms,
the wind and the water, had erased parts of the engraving. In other
places hunters had built their smoking camp-fires against the face of
the rock and blurred the markings, or had wantonly fired bullets into
the faces and destroyed the work of the Indians.

As I was getting my camera arranged to get a picture of one group, an
old Indian came riding up the creek on a pinto pony. Soon came dogs, and
squaws dragging their tepee poles, and without so much as a "How," they
began tearing off their packs and setting up their lodges. The packs
consisted of old kettles, stale meat, old elk skins made into robes,
parflesakes filled to the brim with pemmican, made of elk fat, choke
cherries, and jerked elk half dried and half horsehair. Several young
puppies, too young to walk, were tied with soft thongs just under the
fore legs of the ponies.

Within half an hour the whole Little Basin was filled with the smell of
spoiled meat and musty old blankets, spread in the sun to dry, and the
whole camp looked like the dump ground of a small town.

The old chief turned the entire care of the horses, dogs, provisions and
camp over to the squaws, and while t