The Captain's Dog Read Online Free PDF Page A

continue to be plagued by various ailments. Last night Captain Clark lanced a boil on one of the men and a pint of pus was taken from the wound. Private Whitehouse cut his knee with his knife and lost a great deal of blood, but we managed to stem the flow. Sergeant Floyd has had a bad cold for several days and some stomach problems, which I am treating.
    I have been virtually free of dark moods, and my strength and health have been good as have Captain Clark's. He is 34 years old today. For his birthday dinner he has requested a saddle of fat venison, roasted beaver tail, and elk steak, and for dessert some of the berries growing so profusely around here.
    The men are clearly feeling the effects of their labors. We will rest here a few days and wait for the Otos. We hope this will give the men a chance to recover their strength....
    CAPTAIN LEWIS calculated that each man was eating nine pounds of meat a day, and yet some of them were still going to sleep hungry. One night Drouillard came back to camp with an elk, Private Reubin Field came in with two deer, and John Colter brought in two beavers with fat tails, but this was barely enough food to feed the camp for one day.
    This dearth of meat did not affect me, because there were certain parts of the animals the men refused to eat They threw out piles of perfectly good food, entrails mostly, that were more than enough to slake my appetite. But the meat I was really looking forward to getting my teeth into was that buffalo animal's. The men were constantly talking about this beast, but only a handful of them had actually seen one. Every time I heard the word
buffalo,
drool spilled out of my mouth.

    "Ready to ramble to the top of the bluff?" Captain Clark asked.
    "I am." Captain Lewis put his pen down and closed the red book. "Let's go, Sea."
    I ran ahead of them. As I neared the top I scented
something unfamiliar. I stopped and tried to get a sense of what this new smell meant, but no picture came to mind. The captains caught up with me and we stepped through an opening in the brush.
    We were stunned by what we saw. I managed a low growl, but the captains were speechless for a moment or two. I hadn't seen an open area this big since I was a pup aboard ship. Before us was an ocean of golden grass stretching as far as we could see. The wind moved the long grass back and forth across the endless flat plain in long rolling waves.
    "Prairie," Captain Clark said. "I had no idea it was so..." He couldn't seem to find the right word.
    "Vast," Captain Lewis said.
    For several minutes we just stood there staring at the stark, lonely beauty of it. All day long we had fought the river, not knowing this lay just above us. We walked about a mile across the grassy plain to a small stand of trees.
    "
Caw! Caw! Caw!
"
    A crow scolded us from the branch of one of the trees. I had seen hundreds of crows and ravens, but never one like this. On his left wing was a patch of feathers as white as a scrubbed mainsail.
    "
Caw! Caw! Caw!
"
    The captains were so used to hearing crows they didn't even bother to look up at it. I barked, trying to get their attention on the bird. If Captain Lewis saw it,
he would certainly want to add it to his animal collection. He glanced up at the tree, then back across the prairie. I barked again.
    "Quiet, Sea!" Captain Lewis said. "What's gotten into you?"
    I guessed he had seen crows with white feathers on their wings before and was not interested in collecting this one. He would not have been able to shoot it anyway, because the next time I looked, the crow had vanished.

    On our way back across the prairie I came across several new scents I was eager to investigate, but they had to wait because Captain Clark wanted to get back to camp and see how the men were doing with his birthday feast.
    When we arrived Private Joseph Fields ran up to us. He was carrying a brownish gray animal about the size of a cat. Joseph and his older brother, Reubin, were both good hunters.