Hunting in Many Lands 



glers. This same year I was rather surprised 

 at meeting a porcupine, usually a beast of the 

 timber, at least twenty miles from trees. He 

 was grubbing after sagebrush roots on the 

 edge of a cut bank by a half-dried creek, I 

 was stalking an antelope at the time, and 

 stopped to watch him for about five minutes. 

 He paid no heed to me, though I was within 

 three or four paces of him. Both the luciver, 

 or northern lynx, and the wolverine have been 

 found on the Little Missouri, near the Kildeer 

 Mountains, but I do not know of a specimen 

 of either that has been killed there for some 

 years past. The blackfooted ferret was al- 

 ways rare, and is rare now. But few beaver 

 are left; they were very abundant in 1880, but 

 were speedily trapped out when the Indians 

 vanished and the Northern Pacific Railroad 

 was built. While this railroad was building, 

 the bears frequently caused much trouble by 

 industriously damming the culverts. 



With us the first animal to disappear was 

 the buffalo. In the old days, say from 1870 

 to r88o, the buffalo were probably the most 

 abundant of all animals along the Little Mis- 

 souri in the region that I know, ranging, say, 

 from Pretty Buttes to the Killdeer Mountains. 



30(5 



