272 Hunting Trips on the Prairie 



had one adventure with a buffalo, in which he re 

 ceived rather a fright. He had been out on foot 

 with a dog and had severely wounded a buffalo bull, 

 which nevertheless, with the wonderful tenacity of 

 life and ability to go over apparently inaccessible 

 places that this species shows, managed to clamber 

 up a steep, almost perpendicular, cliff. My cousin 

 climbed up after it, with some difficulty ; on reaching 

 the top he got his elbows over and drew himself 

 up on them only to find the buffalo fronting him 

 with lowered head not a dozen feet off. Immediate 

 ly upon seeing him it cocked up its tail and came 

 forward. He was clinging with both hands to the 

 edge and could not use his rifle; so, not relishing 

 what was literally a tete-a-tete, he promptly let go 

 and slid, or rather rolled, head over heels to the foot 

 of the cliff, not hurting himself much in the sand, 

 though of course a good deal jarred by the fall. 

 The buffalo came on till its hoofs crumbled the earth 

 at the brink, when the dog luckily got up and dis 

 tracted its attention; meanwhile, my cousin, having 

 bounced down to the bottom, picked himself up, 

 shook himself, and finding that nothing was broken, 

 promptly scrambled up the bluff at another place 

 a few yards off and shot his antagonist. 



When my cattle first came on the Little Mis 

 souri three of my men took a small bunch of them 

 some fifty miles to the south and there wintered 

 with them, on what were then the outskirts of the 

 buffalo range, the herds having been pressed up 

 northward. In the intervals of tending the cattle 



