November 2, 1833
The wind was cold, raw, and so strong that we could only sail around the headland nearby and [then] stay there the whole day. On top of the high bank of sand, in a young thicket of [slender] cottonwoods, [the men] lit a fire, around which we camped and cooked our breakfast.
Four of Mr. Campbell’s men traveled up the river past us in a canot loaded with Indian corn. They had left Fort Clark fourteen days ago. At nine o’clock I left the fire and stalked around in the thicket, where I found bear scat and tracks. The former contained whole heaps of digested undigested buffalo berry skins.
Parus atricapillus was the only small bird in these bushes. I found a burrow of the prairie, or kit, fox and saw such an animal on it. Suddenly a shot was fired close to me. It was Dreidoppel, who had [gone out] with the combination over-andunder rifle and shotgun. I walked toward the sound and found that he had just wounded a [young] deer (Cervus virginianus). We followed the blood on dense rose bushes in a sparsely grown part of the forest. The deer sat down often and I finally shot it. Its companion, a brocket, had run away and came back now. I saw it standing for everyone to see, eighty steps away, and shot it. Both [deer] were round and fat, because the [young] deer have not yet rutted. I walked toward the campfire; some [crewmen] carried the game along and then butchered it. The wind continued to be very unpleasantly raw. It carried sand through the air [everywhere].
In the afternoon I went out again with Mr. Bodmer to the entrails of the deer, where we found many ravens, crows, and magpies, but no wolf, as we had hoped. We saw the striped ground squirrel [and] found tracks of bears and their scat completely full of berries. Tracks were everywhere in the sand. When night came, the fire was [built higher]; it was dark at six o’clock. We remained sitting at the fire till seven o’clock while people slept. The night was dark, the willow thicket around us black, dark. Wolves howled loudly on both banks of the river. After nine o’clock the moon rose; it was not cold, and toward midnight the wind abated.