Here we found our blankets and other camp equipment as we had left them. But the ravens had robbed us of all our food, other than an unstripped fragment of the deer's ribs. Though one of the men had killed a partridge during our descent, the bird and the lean deer bones together formed a scant enough meal for four men who had not eaten in two days. About noon the next day we shot two buffaloes, upon whose flesh we gorged ourselves like Indians, and I, for one, am convinced that we had well earned the full meal. In the valley, all up and down the creek, we found many old Comanche camps, but the Indians had undoubtedly gone south for the Winter. The next day brought us back to our little stockade on the Arkansas. CHAPTER XVIII FAMINE AND FROST Many even of our Western-bred officers would have considered themselves justified in lying about camp for at least a day after such a trip. Not so Pike. Toward noon of the next day, which was the last of November, our entire party marched on up the main stream, in the thick of a heavy snowstorm. We had at last come to the real hardships of our voyage. Within the week two or three of the men suffered frosted feet. The temperature fell to nearly twenty degrees below zero, so that even I felt the cold keenly through my hunting clothes, while the Lieutenant and the others, clad only in their cotton wear, suffered still more from the stinging frost. Yet, despite all the troubles and hardships of ourselves and our half-starved horses, we held to our explorations, day after day, killing an occasional buffalo or deer, and gradually working our way into the midst of the mighty mountains, northward and westward behind the Grand Peak, along what we thought to be the Spanish trace. At last we came to a large stream, which, to our astonishment, ran to the northeast. Though against all our previous theories, we were forced to believe that this must be the river La Platte. Ascending the stream in a northwesterly direction, all alike suffering greatly from the cold of these high valleys, we passed signs of an immense encampment of Indians. But we saw no more of the Spanish trace, or rather of the Indian trace which we had followed into the mountains, thinking it to be the Spanish. Turning back upon our own trace some little distance, we crossed over a pass in the mountains to the southwest, and descending a small stream, came upon what we thought to be the upper waters of the Red River. Here, while our wretched, famished beasts were recruiting themselves upon a favorable bit of pasture land, the Lieutenant marched with a small party to explore upstream. At the same time Baroney and I marched down the river, our mission being to kill game for the others, who were to follow us in a day or two.