252 The Lordly Buffalo. 



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 distracted 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 Missouri 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 northwards. In the intervals of tending 

 the cattle work which was then entirely new to them 

 they occupied themselves in hunting buffalo, killing during 

 the winter sixty or seventy, some of them on horseback, 

 but mostly by still-hunting them on foot. Once or twice 

 the bulls when wounded turned to bay ; and a couple of 

 them on one occasion charged one of the men and forced 

 him to take refuge upon a steep isolated butte. At 

 another time the three of them wounded a cow so badly 

 that she broke down and would run no farther, turning to 

 bay in a small clump of thick trees. As this would have 

 been a very bad place in which to skin the body, they 

 wished to get her out and tried to tease her into charging ; 

 but she seemed too weak to make the effort. Emboldened 

 by her apathy one of the men came up close to her behind, 

 while another was standing facing her; and the former 

 finally entered the grove of trees and poked her with a 

 long stick. This waked her up most effectually, and 

 instead of turning on her assailant she went headlong at 



