Chapter 19

How if he will not stand?
--Shakspeare.

The several movements, related in the close of the preceding chapter,
had passed in so short a space of time, that the old man, while he
neglected not to note the smallest incident, had no opportunity of
expressing his opinion concerning the stranger's motives. After the
Pawnee had disappeared, however, he shook his head and muttered, while
he walked slowly to the angle of the thicket that the Indian had just
quitted--

"There are both scents and sounds in the air, though my miserable
senses are not good enough to hear the one, or to catch the taint of
the other."

"There is nothing to be seen," cried Middleton, who kept close at his
side. "My eyes and my ears are good, and yet I can assure you that I
neither hear nor see any thing."

"Your eyes are good! and you are not deaf!" returned the other with a
slight air of contempt; "no, lad, no; they may be good to see across a
church, or to hear a town-bell, but afore you had passed a year in
these prairies you would find yourself taking a turkey for a buffaloe,
or conceiting, fifty times, that the roar of a buffaloe bull was the
thunder of the Lord! There is a deception of natur' in these naked
plains, in which the air throws up the images like water, and then it
is hard to tell the prairies from a sea. But yonder is a sign that a
hunter never fails to know!"

The trapper pointed to a flight of vultures, that were sailing over
the plain at no great distance, and apparently in the direction in
which the Pawnee had riveted his eye. At first Middleton could not
distinguish the small dark objects, that were dotting the dusky
clouds, but as they came swiftly onward, first their forms, and then
their heavy waving wings, became distinctly visible.

"Listen," said the trapper, when he had succeeded in making Middleton
see the moving column of birds. "Now you hear the buffaloes, or
bisons, as your knowing Doctor sees fit to call them, though buffaloes
is their name among all the hunters of these regions. And, I conclude,
that a hunter is a better judge of a beast and of its name," he added,
winking to the young soldier, "than any man who has turned over the
leaves of a book, instead of travelling over the face of the 'arth, in
order to find out the natur's of its inhabitants."

"Of their habits, I will grant you," cried the naturalist, who rarely
missed an opportunity to agitate any disputed point in his favourite
studies. "That is, provided always, deference is had to the proper use
of definitions, and that they are contemplated with scientific eyes."

"Eyes of a mole! as if man's