They found the Indians extremely well disposed, and ready to render them every assistance in their power, in return for the trifling presents they made them. Altogether there might be about 400 of them, and about half as many more were encamped upon the Santa Cruz River further south. These were apparently the only inhabitants of those regions. They said that in their journeys northward they fell in with no other toldos or encampments till they came to a river twenty-five days off; there were some more two days beyond again upon a second river, and thence it was twenty days further to the toldos of the Indians of Tuca-malal, on the river called by Villariño the Encarnacion, which falls into the great River Negro; altogether, according to their computation, something less than fifty days' travel from San Julian's[20]. To those parts they were in the habit of occasionally repairing in order to buy fresh horses from the tribes there resident, who they said had plenty of them, and exchanged them for the guanaco skins which they took from the more southern part of the country. They caught those animals with their bolas and lassoes, and often supplied the colonists with fresh meat when they had no means of their own of obtaining it. This assistance was of the greater value to them, as the winter set in with a severity, against which they were very indifferently prepared. The months of June, July, and August were piercingly cold, much snow fell, and the people, unused to such a climate, became very sickly, and many of them died. Viedma himself was so ill as to be some time confined to his bed; nor was it till the return of spring that the survivors began to recover their strength, and were able to go on with the works. They got through the subsequent winter better, after their houses were completed, and they were able to collect some necessary comforts about them. The vegetables they planted throve well, and in the second February they gathered in their first harvest, which yielded a fair crop in proportion to the corn sown. The brushwood in the surrounding country was sufficient to supply them with fuel, but there was no timber fit for building, of which they were daily in want; and in quest of this Viedma was induced to make an excursion into the interior by the Indians, who asserted that an abundance was to be had near the source of the Santa Cruz river, which they said was a great lake at the foot of the Cordillera, whither they offered to guide him.