From my bed I watched the stars come slowly out above the dark battlements of the mountains. Overhead the nighthawks were feeding, pitching about and diving with a rushing sound of their wings. I saw a flock of ducks on the lake and a solitary beaver swimming in the twilight. After dark the night wind began to blow, sighing through the branches of my pine tree. I heard the lapping of water along the sandy shore, roar of an avalanche, and the distant thunder of cataracts wind-borne across the lake. There is no sweeter chorus than the songs of birds in the early northern dawn. I heard thrushes and purple finches in the willows and Western yellow-throats and evening grosbeaks in groves of quaking aspen. Along the lake-shore the dominant singers were the white-crowned sparrows with sweet and uplifted melody. After sunrise I had a swim luxuriously cold. I dove deep and gazed through the depths of the clear green water, while little bubbles floated around my body; then came up into the sunlight and floated on my back, gazing into a sky of deepest blue. For a moment I lay still and my body seemed to leave me; then swam into the lake, cutting through the clear cold water until I landed on a sandy beach, where the sun felt hot on my back and I tingled from head to foot. My Indian friends never burdened themselves with work. They lay in the sun for hours and did not work until they felt like it. We cut the straight and slender trees of lodge-pole pine for tepee poles, peeling off the bark and standing them in the sun to dry. The women also gathered plants and herbs in meadow and forest, both for eating and healing; and they helped me make a botanical collection [3] of my own. For vegetables they gathered wild onions, wild potatoes, cow parsnip, bitterroot and prairie turnip. But the camas was their favorite vegetable. It had a root like a small potato and had a sweet flavor. They roasted the stalks of the cow parsnip, when they were tender and juicy in the spring; and dried the leaves of bearberry for tobacco, also pipsissewa or princess pine. They used a lichen that grows on pine trees as yellow dye, a pore fungus for cleaning buckskin, and yellow orthocarpus for dyeing skins. For eye inflammation they used the blossoms of horsemint, the long plumed avens for coughs, Oregon grape for stomach trouble, and gum plant for the liver. One day I went with Little Creek for a hunting trip on the mountains. He took his rifle and I my camera for pictures. Little Creek was a good guide. He had the instinct of an Indian for traveling in the forest and a wonderful memory for landmarks. He was a fountain of shrewd wisdom and something of a philosopher.