, glad to
find their "white elephant" of some use at last. From the northern
tribes he brought down skins and _almagre_ (the red clay so
indispensable to the savages for face-paint), flakes of flint to make
arrow-heads, hard reeds for the shafts, and tassels of deer-hair dyed
red. These things he readily exchanged among the coast tribes for
shells and shell-beads, and the like,--which, in turn, were in demand
among his northern customers.

On account of their constant wars, the Indians could net venture outside
their own range; so this safe go-between trader was a convenience which
they encouraged. So far as he was concerned, though the life was still
one of great suffering, he was constantly gaining knowledge which would
be useful to him in his never-forgotten plan of getting back to the
world. These lonely trading expeditions of his covered thousands of
miles on foot through the trackless wildernesses; and through them his
aggregate wanderings were much greater than those of either of his
fellow-prisoners.

It was during these long and awful tramps that Cabeza de Vaca had one
particularly interesting experience. He was the first European who saw
the great American bison, the buffalo, which has become practically
extinct in the last decade, but once roamed the plains in vast
hordes,--and first by many years. He saw them and ate their meat in the
Red River country of Texas, and has left us a description of the
"hunchback cows." None of his companions ever saw one, for in their
subsequent journey together the four Spaniards passed south of the
buffalo-country.

Meanwhile, as I have noted, the forlorn and naked trader had had the
duties of a doctor forced upon him. He did not understand what this
involuntary profession might do for him,--he was simply pushed into it
at first, and followed it not from choice, but to keep from having
trouble. He was "good for nothing but to be a medicine-man." He had
learned the peculiar treatment of the aboriginal wizards, though not
their fundamental ideas. The Indians still look upon sickness as a
"being possessed;" and their idea of doctoring is not so much to cure
disease, as to exorcise the bad spirits which cause it.

This is done by a sleight-of-hand rigmarole, even to this day. The
medicine-man would suck the sore spot, and pretend thus to extract a
stone or thorn which was supposed to have been the cause of trouble; and
the patient was "cured." Cabeza de Vaca began to "practi