90 The Wilderness Hunter. 



any sign of water, night closed on me before I found any. 

 For two or three hours I stumbled on, leading my horse, 

 in my fruitless search ; then a tumble over a cut bank in 

 the dark warned me that I might as well stay where I was 

 for the rest of the warm night. Accordingly I unsaddled 

 the horse, and tied him to a sage brush ; after awhile he 

 began to feed on the dewy grass. At first I was too 

 thirsty to sleep. Finally I fell into slumber, and when 

 I awoke at dawn I felt no thirst. For an hour or two 

 more I continued my search for water in the creek bed ; 

 then abandoned it and rode straight for the river. By 

 the time we reached it my thirst had come back with re- 

 doubled force, my mouth was parched, and the horse was 

 in quite as bad a plight ; we rushed down to the brink, and 

 it seemed as if we could neither of us ever drink our fill 

 of the tepid, rather muddy water. Of course this expe- 

 rience was merely unpleasant ; thirst is not a source of 

 real danger in the plains country proper, whereas in the 

 hideous deserts that extend from southern Idaho through 

 Utah and Nevada to Arizona, it ever menaces with death 

 the hunter and explorer. 



In the plains the weather is apt to be in extremes ; 

 the heat is tropical, the cold arctic, and the droughts are 

 relieved by furious floods. These are generally most 

 severe and lasting in the spring, after the melting of the 

 snow ; and fierce local freshets follow the occasional cloud- 

 bursts. The large rivers then become wholly impassable, 

 and even the smaller are formidable obstacles. It is not 

 easy to get cattle across a swollen stream, where the 

 current runs like a turbid mill-race over the bed of shift- 



