8o Hunting Trips of a Ranchman 



By the middle of August the young are well 

 enough grown to shoot, and are then most delicious 

 eating. Different coveys at this time vary greatly 

 in their behavior if surprised feeding in the open. 

 Sometimes they will not permit of a very close ap- 

 proach, and will fly off after one or two have been 

 shot; while again they will show perfect indiffer- 

 ence to the approach of man, and will allow the lat- 

 ter to knock off the heads of five or six with his 

 rifle before the rest take the alarm and fly off. They 

 now go more or less all over the open ground, but 

 are especially fond of frequenting the long grass in 

 the bottoms of the coulies and ravines and the dense 

 brush along the edges of the creeks and in the val- 

 leys ; there they will invariably be found at midday, 

 and will lie till they are almost trodden on before 

 rising. 



Late in the month of August one year we had been 

 close-herding a small bunch of young cattle on a 

 bottom about a mile square, walled in by bluffs, and 

 with, as an inlet, a long, dry creek running back 

 many miles into the Bad Lands, where it branched 

 out into innumerable smaller creeks and coulies. We 

 wished to get the cattle accustomed to the locality, 

 for animals are more apt to stray when first brought 

 on new ground than at any later period; so each 

 night we "bedded" them on the level bottom that 

 is, gathering them together on the plain, one of us 

 would ride slowly and quietly round and round the 

 herd, heading off and turning back into it all beasts 

 that tried to stray off, but carefully avoiding dis- 



