ugout canoes,
with their rifles, blankets, tomahawks, and fishing-tackle. They met
some Shawnees and got on well with them; but while their leader was
visiting the chief, Cornstalk, and listening to his fair speeches at his
town of Old Chilicothe, the rest of the party were startled to see a
band of young Shawnee braves returning from a successful foray on the
settlements, driving before them the laden pack-horses they had
stolen.[32]

They explored part of Kentucky, and visited the different licks. One,
long named Big Bone Lick, was famous because there were scattered about
it in incredible quantity the gigantic remains of the extinct mastodon;
the McAfees made a tent by stretching their blankets over the huge
fossil ribs, and used the disjointed vertebrae as stools on which to sit.
Game of many kinds thronged the spaces round the licks; herds of
buffalo, elk, and deer, as well as bears and wolves, were all in sight
at once. The ground round about some of them was trodden down so that
there was not as much grass left as would feed a sheep; and the game
trails were like streets, or the beaten roads round a city. A little
village to this day recalls by its name the fact that it stands on a
former "stamping ground" of the buffalo. At one lick the explorers met
with what might have proved a serious adventure. One of the McAfees and
a companion were passing round its outskirts, when some others of the
party fired at a gang of buffaloes, which stampeded directly towards the
two. While his companion scampered up a leaning mulberry bush, McAfee,
less agile, leaped behind a tree trunk, where he stood sideways till the
buffalo passed, their horns scraping off the bark on either side; then
he looked round to see his friend "hanging in the mulberry bush like a
coon."[33]

When the party left this lick they followed a buffalo trail, beaten out
in the forest, "the size of the wagon road leading out of Williamsburg,"
then the capital of Virginia. It crossed the Kentucky River at a riffle
below where Frankfort now stands. Thence they started homewards across
the Cumberland Mountains, and suffered terribly while making their way
through the "desolate and voiceless solitudes"; mere wastes of cliffs,
crags, caverns, and steep hillsides covered with pine, laurel, and
underbrush. Twice they were literally starving and were saved in the
nick of time by the killing, on the first occasion, of a big bull elk,
on the next, of a small spike bu