76 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 



vague, whitish forms the coyotes keeping watch, 

 stealthy and shunless as death. 



The northward movement of the buffalo began with 

 the spring. Odd scattered herds might have roamed 

 the valleys in the winter; but as the grass grew deeper 

 and lush with spring rains, the reaches of the prairie 

 land became literally covered with the humpback, furry 

 forms of the roving herds. Indian legend ascribed 

 their coming directly to the spirits. The more prosaic 

 white man explained that the buffalo were only emer 

 ging from winter shelter, and their migration was a 

 search for fresh feeding-ground. 



Be that as it may, northward they came, in strag 

 gling herds that covered the prairie like a flock of 

 locusts; in close-formed battalions, with leaders and 

 scouts and flank guards protecting the cows and the 

 young; in long lines, single file, leaving the ground, 

 soft from spring rains, marked with a rut like a ditch ; 

 in a mad stampede at a lumbering gallop that roared 

 like an ocean tide up hills and down steep ravines, 

 sure-footed as a mountain-goat, thrashing through the 

 swollen water-course of river and slough, up embank 

 ments with long beards and fringed dewlaps dripping 

 on and on and on till the tidal wave of life had 

 hulked over the sky-line beyond the heaving horizon. 

 Here and there in the brownish-black mass were white 

 and gray forms, light-coloured buffalo, freaks in the 

 animal world. 



The age of the calves in each year s herd varied. 

 The writer remembers a sturdy little buffalo that ar 

 rived on the scene of this troublous life one freezing 

 night in January, with a howling blizzard and the ther 

 mometer at forty below a combination that is suffi- 



