"Something like that," he told her. "O good! Good!" I all but shouted. "That means that I shall have no end of good times riding about and hunting with Pitamakan!" He, you know, was my true-and-tried chum. Young though we were, we had experienced some wild adventures. We two had passed a winter in the depths of the Rockies; we had been to the shore of the Western Sea and back; and we had seen the great deserts and the strange peoples of the always-summer land. It was in my mind, now, that this sudden turn in the affairs of my uncle was to be the cause of more adventures for us. I could fairly scent them. As to Tsistsaki, she went almost crazy with joy. "The gods are good to us!" she cried. "They have answered my prayers! Oh, how I have begged them, my man, to turn your steps to the wide plains and the mountains of our great hunting-ground! It is not good for us, you know, to live shut within these walls winter after winter and summer after summer, seeing no farther than the slopes and the cutbanks of this river bottom. To be well and happy we must do some roaming now and then and live as Old Man, our Maker, intended us to live, in airy buffalo-leather lodges, and close upon the breast of our mother [the earth]. Tell me, now, where we are going and when, so that I may have all our things packed." "I cannot tell you that until I have talked with the chiefs. I am going now to counsel with them, for the steamboat starts back for St. Louis very early in the morning, and upon the decision of the chiefs depends the size of the trade-goods orders that I shall send down with the captain." "We shall go over to camp with you!" Tsistsaki declared. My uncle told me to order the stableman, Bissette, to saddle three horses for us. Within fifteen minutes we were heading for the valley of the Teton, five miles to the north, where more than ten thousand Indians were waiting to trade their winter take of robes and furs for the goods that the steamboats were to bring to us. All the North Blackfeet and the Bloods and the Gros Ventres were there, and our own people, the Pikuni, the southern, or Montana, branch, of the great Blackfoot Confederacy. We called the Pikuni "our people," because nearly all of our company men in Fort Benton were married to women of that tribe. What a thunder of sound struck our ears as we arrived at the edge of the valley slope and looked down into it! It was all aglow with fires shining yellow through the buffalo-leather lodge skins. Drums were booming; people were singing, laughing, and dancing; children were shouting; horses were impatiently whinnying for their mates; and dogs were howling defiance to their wild kin of the plains, the deep-voiced wolves and shrill-yelping coyotes. We paused but a moment, listening to it all, and hurried on down to the camp of the Pikuni and the lodge of White Wolf, chief of the Small Robes Clan, brother of Tsistsaki and father of my chum, Pitamakan--Running Eagle.