64 The Wilderness Hunter 



hills and white cliff walls guarding the river, bring- 

 ing into high relief their strangely carved and chan- 

 neled fronts. Below camp the river was little but 

 a succession of shallow pools strung along the broad 

 sandy bed which in spring-time was rilled from bank 

 to bank with foaming muddy water. Two mallards 

 sat in one of these pools ; and I hit one with the rifle, 

 so nearly missing that the ball scarcely ruffled a 

 feather ; yet in some way the shock told, for the bird, 

 after flying thirty yards, dropped on the sand. 



Then we left the river and our active ponies scram- 

 bled up a small canyon-like break in the bluffs. All 

 day we rode among the hills; sometimes across 

 rounded slopes, matted with short buffalo grass; 

 sometimes over barren buttes of red or white clay, 

 where only sage brush and cactus grew; or beside 

 deep ravines, black with stunted cedar; or along 

 beautiful winding coulies, where the grass grew 

 rankly, and the thickets of ash and wild plum made 

 brilliant splashes of red and yellow and tender green. 

 Yet we saw nothing. 



As evening grew on we rode riverward; we slid 

 down the steep bluff walls, and loped across a great 

 bottom of sage brush and tall grass, our horses now 

 and then leaping like cats over the trunks of dead 

 cottonwoods. As we came to the brink of the cut 

 bank which forms the hither boundary of the river 

 in freshet time, we suddenly saw two deer, a doe 

 and a well grown fawn of course long out of the 



