We are encamped right on the main war road of the Blackfeet into the country of the West Side tribes. Once, when camped here with the Small Robes (I-nuk´-siks), the band, or gens, of which I was a member, I saw a party of our young men make their preparations and start westward on a raid. They gathered in a sweat lodge with an old medicine man, who prayed earnestly for their success while he sprinkled the hot rocks with water, and dense steam filled the place. And at dusk, carrying in painted rawhide cylinders their war finery, and in little sacks their extra moccasins, awl and sinew for repairs, and their little paint bags, they stole out in single file from the camp and headed for the summit of the range. Every evening, during their absence, the old medicine man rode all through the camp, shaking his medicine rattles, singing the song for the absent, calling over and over each one's name, and praying for his safe return. And then, one morning some two weeks later, they came into camp with a rush, driving before them sixty or seventy horses that they had taken from the Kootenais. And two carried a slender wand from which dangled a scalp. They came in singing the song of victory; and then the war chief shouted: "A multitude of the enemy are on our trail. Break camp, you women, and move down river. Take your weapons, you men, and turn back with us!" We took our weapons. We mounted our horses and rode like mad up the old war trail, and within a half-hour sighted the enemy, forty or fifty of them, strung out in a long, straggling line, according to the strength and speed of each one's horse. We exchanged a few shots with the lead riders; one fell; the rest took their back trail, and how they did go up the steep incline to the summit, and over it. We did not pursue them: "Let them go!" Bear Chief shouted. "We have many of their horses; we have scalped three of them; let them go!" We "let them go!" and, indeed, that was the wiser way: they could have made a stand at the summit and shot us down as fast as we came on. The old war road! How many of my people have traveled over it, some of them never to return. It was along this road that Pi´tamakan, virgin woman warrior, led her warriors in what was to be her last raid! But how many, many times our people have come rushing homeward over it, singing their songs of victory, waving the scalps they have taken, and driving before them great bands of the horses of the Pend d'Oreilles, the Snakes, the Nez Percés, and other tribes of the Columbia River watershed.