"I suppose that you, mother and Gert, want to know how puppy-stew is prepared? Well, when the little things are rolling fat, as round as a ball of butter, the old woman who has charge of the lodge takes them up and feels them all over, and if satisfactory, she chokes them to death by literally hanging them to a tree with a buffalo sinew. When dead, they are singed before the fire, just as you singe a fowl; the entrails are taken out, and then the flesh is boiled in a pot, and eaten as hot as possible. The savages, particularly the old squaws, can take up in their buffalo-horn spoons, meat which would scald a white person to death, and swallow it without the slightest difficulty. I suppose that that, and their constant brooding over a smoky fire in the tepees, makes them look so old and wrinkled at an early age. They are the most horrid-looking witches you ever saw, and they would need no 'fixing up' to play the part in Macbeth." "Talking of curious dishes eaten by the Indians," said Mr. Tucker, "up in Oregon, where I was trapping a good many years ago, the squaws make what I call Indian jelly-cake. They take the black crickets, roasted, which form a large portion of their subsistence, and make a kind of bread of them, after having ground them on a flat stone. They then spread on it the boiled berries of the service tree or bush, and if it was not manipulated by their very dirty hands, it would be very palatable." "The Indians of the great plains," continued Kate, "live almost exclusively on meat; they gather a few berries sometimes, but their principal diet is buffalo meat. "After I had been in the village for over four months, I began to think of trying to escape. My clothes were becoming more ragged every day, and I was obliged to resort to the blanket as a covering, though I kept what I had worn there as long as I could.