Even while speaking, the bee-hunter advanced, and raising a sort of shawl, that once had been used as an ornament, and which had last been thrown carelessly over the head of its late owner, he exposed the well-known features of Elks-foot, the Pottawattamie, who had left them little more than twenty-four hours before!  The warrior had been shot by a rifle-bullet directly through the temple, and had been scalped.  The powder had been taken from his horn, and the bullets from his pouch; but, beyond this, he had not been plundered.  The body was carefully placed against a tree, in a sitting attitude, the rifle was laid across its legs, and there it had been left, in the centre of the openings, to become food for beasts of prey, and to have its bones bleached by the snows and the rains!

The bee-hunter shuddered, as he gazed at this fearful memorial of the violence against which even a wilderness could afford no sufficient protection.  That Pigeonswing had slain his late fellow-guest, le Bourdon had no doubt, and he sickened at the thought.  Although he had himself dreaded a good deal from the hostility of the Pottawattamie, he could have wished this deed undone.  That there was a jealous distrust of each other between the two Indians had been sufficiently apparent; but the bee-hunter could not have imagined that it would so soon lead to results as terrible as these!

After examining the body, and noting the state of things around it, the men proceeded, deeply impressed with the necessity, not only of their speedy removal, but of their standing by each other in that remote region, now that violence had so clearly broken out among the tribes.  The bee-hunter had taken a strong liking to the Chippewa, and he regretted so much the more to think that he had done this deed.  It was true, that such a state of things might exist as to justify an Indian warrior, agreeably to his own notions, in taking the life of any one of a hostile tribe; but le Bourdon wished it had been otherwise.  A man of gentle and peaceable disposition himself, though of a profoundly enthusiastic temperament in his own peculiar way, he had ever avoided those scenes of disorder and bloodshed, which are of so frequent occurrence in the forest and on the prairies; and this was actually the first instance in which he had ever beheld a human body that had fallen by human hands.  Gershom had seen more of the peculiar life of the frontiers than his companion, in consequence of having lived so closely in contact with the “fire-water”; but even he was greatly shocked with the suddenness and nature of the Pottawattamie’s end.

No attempt was made to bury the remains of Elksfoot, inasmuch as our adventurers had no tools fit for such a purpose, and any merely superficial interment would have been a sort of invitation to the wolves to dig the body up again.

“Let him lean ag’in’ the tree,” said Waring, as they moved on toward the spot where the carcass of the deer was left, “and I’ll engage nothin’ touches him.  There’s that about the face of man, Bourdon, that skears the beasts; and if a body can only muster courage to stare them full in the eye, one single human can drive before him a whull pack of wolves.”