244 Hunting Trips on the Prairie 



cliffs ; some of the ridges, with perfectly perpendicu 

 lar sides, are so worn away that they stand up like 

 gigantic knife blades; and gulches, wash-outs, and 

 canyons dig out the sides of each butte, while be 

 tween them are thrust out long spurs, with sharp 

 ragged tops. All such patches of barren, broken 

 ground, where the feed seems too scant to support 

 any large animal, are the favorite haunts of the big 

 horn, though it also wanders far into the somewhat 

 gentler and more fertile, but still very rugged, do 

 main of the black-tail deer. 



Between all such masses of rough country lay 

 wide, grassy plateaus or long stretches of bare 

 plain, covered with pebbly shingle. We loped across 

 all these open places ; and when we came to a reach 

 of broken country would leave our horses and hunt 

 through it on foot. Except where the wind had 

 blown it off, there was a thin coat of snow over 

 everything, and the icy edges and sides of the cliffs 

 gave only slippery and uncertain foothold, so as to 

 render the climbing doubly toilsome. Hunting the 

 big-horn is at all times the hardest and most diffi 

 cult kind of sport, and is equally trying to both wind 

 and muscle; and for that very reason the big-horn 

 ranks highest among all the species of game that 

 are killed by still-hunting, and its chase constitutes 

 the noblest form of sport with the rifle, always ex 

 cepting, of course, those kinds of hunting where the 

 quarry is itself dangerous to attack. Climbing kept 

 us warm in spite of the bitter weather; we only wore 

 our fur coats and snaps while on horseback, leaving 



